Health Insurance Coverage in 2013: Gains in Public Coverage Continue to Offset Loss of Private Insurance
Executive Summary
Since the Great Recession peaked in 2010, the economic picture has steadily improved, and in 2013, GDP increased relative to 2012 and the unemployment rate fell but remained fairly high at 7.4 percent. In addition, the uninsured rate decreased slightly (0.1 percentage point) in 2013, continuing the trend from 2011 and 2012. Despite these improvements, rates of coverage through employer sponsored insurance have declined since 2010, though more slowly in recent years than at the height of the recession. Gains in coverage since 2010 have been largely due to increases in coverage through public programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Population changes also affected insurance coverage patterns between 2008 and 2013. The only income group with net population growth between 2008 and 2013 was families at or below 138 percent of poverty, which grew by 17.6 million. In contrast, the population with family incomes above 400 percent of poverty shrank by 8.3 million. There were also fewer workers in 2013 (138.0 million) than in 2008 (140.4 million), with a low point of 133.1 million workers in 2010. In addition, national population growth between 2008 and 2013 was concentrated in the South and West, which gained 4.3 million and 1.9 million people, respectively. These regions tend to have lower rates of employer coverage and lower Medicaid eligibility thresholds for adults.
It is important to understand the effect of these population shifts and economic forces on coverage to assess the impact of the ACA. Many of the health insurance coverage expansions in the ACA went into effect on January 1, 2014, making 2013 the final baseline year against which to measure coverage changes under the ACA. Though 2013 is not a perfect baseline (several smaller coverage expansions under the ACA went into effect in 2010, including allowing dependents to stay on their parents’ plan until age 26, and a handful of states fully or partially expanded eligibility for their Medicaid programs in 2010 or 2011), understanding trends in coverage during the recession and recovery will help disentangle the effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage from demographic and economic factors.
In this brief, we examine coverage patterns for the nonelderly population from 2008 through 2013 using data from the American Community Survey. While prior research on this topic has frequently relied on the Census Bureau’s March Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), long planned improvements to the insurance questions for that survey resulted in a break in trend between the 2013 CPS and the 2014 CPS, which collected data on coverage in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Therefore, in order to examine trends from 2008 to 2013, we focused our analysis on the American Community Survey.
