Survey: Uninsured rate drops to 5 percent in Iowa
BUSINESS RECORD STAFF Aug 10, 2015 | 3:50 pm
1 min read time
295 wordsAll Latest News, Health and Wellness, InsuranceThe percentage of Iowans without health insurance has been cut nearly in half in the past two years, according to new survey information released by Gallup. Just 5 percent of Iowans were uninsured in the first half of 2015, compared with 9.7 percent in 2013, the survey found.
Iowa’s uninsured rate was among the lowest in the country, with just four states — Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and Minnesota — having lower rates. Rhode Island’s uninsured rate was just 2.7 percent; Texas had the highest uninsured rate at 20.8 percent.
Arkansas and Kentucky continue to have the sharpest reductions in their uninsured rates since the Affordable Care Act took effect at the beginning of 2014. Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington join them as states that have at least a 10-percentage-point reduction in uninsured rates.
Seven of the 10 states with the greatest reductions in uninsured rates have expanded Medicaid and established a state-based marketplace exchange or state-federal partnership, while two have implemented one or the other.
The marketplace exchanges opened on Oct. 1, 2013, with new insurance plans purchased during the last quarter of that year typically starting on Jan. 1, 2014. Medicaid expansion among initially participating states also began with the onset of 2014. As such, 2013 serves as a benchmark year for uninsured rates as they existed prior to the enactment of the two major mechanisms of the health care law.
The results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, with a random sample of 178,072 adults in 2013 and 88,667 adults through the first half of 2015, ages 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error is 1 to 2 percentage points for most states.
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