It’s Still Incredibly Common for Americans to Be Uninsured
The typical measure of Americans without health insurance underreports how many people are going without coverage. Examining how many people go without insurance in a given year reveals that over 20 percent of Americans have gone uninsured in recent years.
Three ambulances are parked in front of the emergency room at Childrens Health of Orange County in California, November 1, 2022. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
People who write about health insurance in the United States frequently cite statistics about what percent of the population has insurance. These statistics typically use point-in-time (PIT) measurements that report what percent of the population is insured at any given moment. These PIT measures are useful but can also mislead people into thinking that health uninsurance is a much less common experience than it really is.
To illustrate this problem with PIT measures, I used the longitudinal Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to determine what percent of the population was uninsured in any given month between January 2017 and December 2020 and what percent of the population was uninsured at any point between January 2017 and December 2020.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.