More than 8% of Americans were without health insurance in the first few months of 2024, according to a new survey released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ending a streak of uninsured rates at historically low levels after the pandemic. Covid-19 pandemic.
According to quarterly figures released Tuesday, 27.1 million Americans of all ages were uninsured in March. The CDC releases estimates of health insurance coverage every three months, based on results from the agency’s National Health Interview Survey.
That increase represents 3.4 million more Americans who lacked health insurance in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2023, the CDC estimates, when about 7.7% of Americans were uninsured.
Future surveys will provide a better understanding of the magnitude of the increase in the uninsured rate this year. The increases so far are not large enough to be statistically significant, said Christy Hagen of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Tuesday’s figures come after years of record-high uninsured rates in the United States touted by Biden administration officials in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the share of uninsured people falling below 8% in 2023 for four consecutive quarters.
Experts and health officials largely attribute the historically low uninsured rate to some changes to health insurance during the pandemic. Before 2020, the country’s uninsured rate had peaked at more than 10%.
One important factor was the pause during the COVID-19 pandemic in which states rechecked the eligibility of Medicaid residents, effectively suspending the “churn” that purges many otherwise eligible enrollees from state health insurance rolls.
The process of resuming eligibility checks after the pandemic — a colossal bureaucratic undertaking dubbed “unwinding” Medicaid — is expected to be completed in nearly all states by this month.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated in June that rates of Americans with health insurance were likely to fall back to pre-pandemic levels by 2026, after Medicaid enrollment declines and temporary subsidies end.
Recent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office also project that the uninsured rate in the United States will worsen in the coming years. In addition to the end of pandemic-era insurance policies, CBO modelers have pointed to increased immigration as another factor likely to push up the uninsured rate.
