Who are the uninsured?

I've regularly heard numbers around 45 million uninsured people in the United States. The number seems astoundingly high given our population is roughly 300 million. So roughly 15% of our nation is uninsured.

Sounds bad. But is the problem really that out of hand? After all there's probably a good chunk of people, especially younger people, who make enough money to afford at least basic health care needs and insure against unexpected ailments and injuries. Some of that figure may be people who are between jobs, or were recently between jobs and waiting for their new coverage at the the new job to go into effect. This sometimes takes a few months. Some of that figure may include people who are eligible for existing programs to help the poor or people hitting rough times.

Here's a graph showing the break down of the uninsured (available along with the full report here) along the lines of whether they are eligible for federal medical coverage programs, make over 3 times the federal poverty level making them likely to be able to afford at least basic coverage and needs, or if they make too much for federal programs and make under 3 times the federal poverty level making them likely to be unable to afford at least basic coverage and/or needs.


Roughly 56% generally make too little to cover their own needs and make too much to qualify for the federal programs. That's still nearly 25 million people who need help.

But are kids the big overwhelming chunk of this? Parents? Or individuals without children?

Here's the breakdown:


The sandwiched numbers in the middle of each bar are the major concerns for helping to make sure people have health care options available.

It looks like about 11% of the 8 million uninsured children are in the gap between eligibility for aid and their family having the income to afford health care. So programs could probably be fairly easily extended to ensure that the roughly 900,000 kids who are in the gap have some lower cost options for coverage to close that gap.

For parents this gap is much larger. Roughly 6.4 million people are in the gap. Extending medicare coverage or other programs that subsidize the costs of insurance in this category on a progressive scale could help put health coverage within their budget. It would be quite a bit more expensive to pull off.

The biggest chunk of people in this gap are childless adults. Roughly 17.6 million of them. This is probably often the category in which you'd find many younger people early on in the workforce. But as the study points out a large portion of the people in this category are over 30 with many of them constituting the working poor in the Southern States. This category may require a more targeted approach from State to State and research into what help is the most needed and what is the most effective way to help. Subsidized help for many, especially on the State level on a progressive scale, could be used to target those who need and desire help the most. The sheer magnitude of this portion of the gap makes confronting it altogether a daunting task where the money just isn't there.

Probably more helpful than anything else is not to purely focus on the symptoms but also the disease. There are large parts of our society that are struggling economically and wise economic policy could make these challenges less daunting though they will probably never entirely go away.