The overall rate of American adults without health insurance dropped nearly twice as much as that for Texans, according to a new report from Rice University and examining the pivotal 2013-2015 period.
The report, produced by the university’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Episcopal Health Foundation (EHF), found that since enrollment began in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in September 2013, the adult uninsured rate in the U.S. fell by 41%. Texas, on the other hand, saw its uninsured rate drop just 21% during the same two-year period.
Texas still has the most uninsured adults in the nation, and Texans with the lowest incomes continue to get health-insurance coverage at a rate far below anyone else,” said Elena Marks, president and CEO of the EHF and a nonresident health policy fellow at the Baker Institute.
“The good news is that Texans, like all Americans, saw meaningful drops in the rates of uninsured since the ACA began.”
The report found that the uninsured rate among low-income adults in Texas dropped 15% – the smallest decline of any group in the state.
Nearly 50 percent of Texans with household incomes below $27,000 a year remain uninsured. Federal subsidies aimed at helping people purchase ACA Marketplace health-insurance plans are not available to these low-income Texans.
“The ACA’s plan for covering the poorest Americans was through Medicaid expansion,” said Vivian Ho, the chair in health economics at Rice’s Baker Institute and director of the institute’s Center for Health and Biosciences, a professor of economics at Rice and a professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “Because Texas opted not to expand Medicaid, around 1 million Texans are in a coverage gap without access to affordable health insurance.”
Ho is advocating Texas fall in line with most other states.
Still strides are being made.
Researchers found that the uninsured rate of all adults across Texas dropped from 24 percent to 19 percent. Each demographic population group experienced improvement in health-insurance coverage.
“This is still an important development for Texas,” Marks said. “The state has had a stubbornly high rate of uninsured residents for many years. Hispanics in Texas had the highest uninsured rate in Texas, but Hispanics are now also seeing the greatest gains in health-insurance coverage.”
