An estimated 30 million people did not have insurance coverage last year, bringing the uninsured rate to 9.2%—only slightly below the major high of 9.7% from 2020, new federal data show.
The National Center for Health Statistics released its latest report Thursday on estimates for health insurance coverage last year. The data showed slight gains in insurance coverage from public programs.
The report showed that last year, among adults 18 to 64, there were 13.5% who were uninsured at the time of the interview while 21.7% had public coverage and 66.6% got private insurance.
Among children up to 17 years old, 4.1% were uninsured, 44.3% had coverage from a public program and 53.8% were in private coverage.
Even though the uninsured rate dipped slightly compared to 2020, there were minimal changes among certain age groups.
For instance, the percentage among adults 18 to 64 didn’t change that much from 2020 (13.9%) to last year at 13.5%. But there was a significant difference between the percentage of adults who were uninsured in 2019, 14.7%, but declined to 13.5% last year.
There was also a boost among adults that had public insurance coverage in 2021, with 21.7% getting such coverage last year compared with 20.5% in 2019.
The increase in public health coverage comes amid major moves by the federal government and Congress to increase affordability of coverage on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges. Increased subsidies from the American Rescue Plan Act helped spur a record-breaking 14.5 million in sign-ups for the exchanges this year.
Other pandemic-related flexibilities included a boost to federal matching rates for Medicaid coverage and a requirement that states not disenroll anyone from their Medicaid rolls.
However, the eligibility redetermination freeze is expected to last until the end of the public health emergency, which could expire this summer. The enhanced subsidies are also expected to go away after this year, but there is an effort in Congress to extend them.
The center emphasized that the report only contains early release estimates that still could change. The estimates are based on data from the 2021 National Health Interview Survey, which is based on information collected from nearly 30,000 adults and 8,293 children.