Number of Uninsured Americans Rose to 8.2% in 2024

August 6, 2024
Robin Foster HealthDay Reporter

Following several years of record low rates of uninsured Americans, a new survey finds more folks are once again without health insurance.

More than 8% of Americans did not have health coverage during the first few months of 2024, according to findings published Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An estimated 27.1 million Americans lacked health insurance through March of this year -- an increase that means 3.4 million more Americans did not have coverage during the first quarter of this year compared to the same time in 2023, when around 7.7% of Americans were uninsured.

Still, the increases are not yet large enough to be considered statistically significant, Christy Hagen, of the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, told CBS News.

Experts and health officials have credited the record low uninsured rates of recent years to pandemic-era changes to health insurance. Before 2020, the nation's uninsured rate had peaked at more than 10%.

One big factor had been a pause in states rechecking the eligibility of residents covered by Medicaid, effectively suspending a practice that tends to purge otherwise eligible enrollees from state health insurance rolls.

Those eligibility checks have now returned, with Medicaid slated to finish them in almost all states by the end of this month.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated in June that the rates of Americans not covered by health insurance were likely to worsen even further by 2026, following declines in Medicaid enrollment and the end of temporary subsidies.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office has also forecast that the U.S. uninsured rate would worsen in the coming years.

More information

The U.S. Census Bureau has more on health insurance in America.

SOURCES: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, report, Aug. 5, 2024; CBS News

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