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2016 County Health Insurance Estimates Now Available

SHADAC Staff
March 28, 2018

The U.S. Census Bureau released Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE) for 2016, providing estimates of health insurance coverage for all counties and states. 

The SAHIE program is the only source of single-year health insurance estimates for every county in the US. Estimates are available for each county by sex, age, and Federal Poverty Level (FPL). Race/ethnicity information is available at the state level.

The following are highlights from the 2016 SAHIE release.

  • Nationwide, county uninsured rates for the nonelderly population (i.e., under age 65) ranged from 2.1% to 33.5% in 2016, with a median county uninsured rate of 10.4%
  • In 1,213 counties, (38.6% of all counties), the 2016 nonelderly uninsured rate was at or below 10%. Only 425 counties (13.5 %) had uninsured rates greater than or equal to 15.0% (Figure 1).
  • Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas all had counties with 2016 nonelderly uninsurance rates that exceeded 30%.
  • The nonelderly uninsured rate decreased between 2015 and 2016 in 629 counties, or 20.0% of all counties. In all, only eight counties experienced an increase in nonelderly uninsured rates from 2015 to 2016.
  • In states that expanded Medicaid aimed at low-income working-age adults, 350 counties (23.4% of counties) had a decrease in the uninsured rate for this population compared with 92 (5.6% of counties) in states that did not expand.

Access the full 2016 SAHIE report and visualizations.

Access the 2016 SAHIE estimates.

Find your county’s 2016 uninsured rate using SAHIE’s interactive data tool.

 

About SAHIE

SAHIE are created using statistical models that combine American Community Survey (ACS) data with population estimates and administrative records.

SAHIE are consistent with the direct ACS survey estimates, but SAHIE are more precise than the ACS 1-year and 5-year survey estimates alone for most counties because SAHIE are supplemented with other data sources.

SHADAC Brief #26 provides an overview of how the SAHIE are developed as well as a comparison of the SAHIE model-based methodology to that used by ACS (see Table 2).