Thursday, November 29, 2018
Georgetown University Health Policy Institute: For many years, that rate [of children in the U.S. without health insurance] has been declining thanks to bipartisan efforts to extend coverage through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). But in 2017, approximately 276,000 more children became uninsured, leading to a total of 3.9 million uninsured children nationwide. The rate for children age 18 and under went up from 4.7 percent in 2016 to 5 percent in 2017, according to our analysis of U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey data. While this may not seem like a huge change, both of these increases are unprecedented in the past decade. Even more troubling, the number of uninsured children increased during a time of economic strength -- in fact, at a time when one would expect the uninsured rate to go down, as more children were covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2017. |
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More Alternate links: Google News | Twitter According to the researchers:: I've written this report for eight years in a row now, and I found it even more notable that no state, except for the District of Columbia, saw any measurable progress in reducing the number of uninsured children in 2017. Never before have we seen such uniformity in state behavior. This finding underscores that even states with the best of intentions were not able to overcome the negative national currents that are affecting children's health coverage. Comments
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