The U.S. Census Bureau has released health insurance coverage estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS), showing that 45.1 million people in the United States were uninsured in 2008, representing 15.1% of the U.S. population. The ACS is a new source of data for health insurance coverage estimates; an important feature of the ACS is that it includes a large enough sample for state-level and sub-state health insurance coverage estimates.
The ACS provides an alternate estimate of state-level insurance coverage estimates currently available only from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS), also conducted by the Census Bureau.
A Census Bureau working paper and key summary tables are available at this link.
SHADAC will host a webinar to discuss the ACS estimates on Wednesday, September 23 at 1:00PM EDT. The webinar is free and open to the public, but registration is required at this link.