Presentation by Julie Sonier to three committees of the Minnesota House of Representatives in Saint Paul, MN, April 6 2010.

| View | Upload your own

Forty-six million Americans, including nine million children, are uninsured, and the problem is growing. To combat this situation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is working in several areas to accomplish the goal of ensuring that everyone in America has affordable and stable health care coverage.

The Foundation supports several complementary initiatives that work at the state level to expand coverage, including Consumer Voices for Coverage, The State Coverage Initiatives (SCI) program, and The University of Minnesota's State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC). Together, these and other Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiatives are building support at the state level for meaningful, sustainable health care reform.

View this YouTube video for a description of how these programs are making an impact.

This report presents state-by-state trends in employer-sponsored health insurance coverage from 2000 to 2008.  This coverage has long been the mainstay of coverage in the United States, particularly for middle class families.

The report was released by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for the 2010 Cover the Uninsured Week, a national effort to highlight the fact that too many Americans are living without health insurance and demand solutions from our nation's leaders.

This Excel file provides summary tables of uninsurance estimates by state, trended from calendar years 1987 through 2010.  One table provides estimates only, and a second table provides the estimates with the standard errors.

Download the Excel file.

Estimates are calculated using SHADAC's enhanced Current Population Survey (CPS) adjustments, which includes several adjustments to the estimates that are not made by the Census Bureau when it reports health insurance estimates from the CPS.

SHADAC developed this enhanced series of health insurance estimates to provide the most accurate and consistent estimates of health insurance coverage. These estimates reweight and adjust the CPS data to account for historical changes in the survey's methodology, the conceptual definition of health insurance coverage, and the population counts used to weight the survey estimates. The enhanced estimates also adjust for procedures used by the Census Bureau to correct for missing data. These adjustments produce estimates that differ from those published by the Census Bureau, generally resulting in lower uninsurance estimates. However, they provide a more accurate assessment of coverage estimates both for any given year and over time.

For more information on the changes applied with this adjustment see SHADAC's technical brief, "SHADAC-Enhanced Current Population Survey Health Insurance Coverage Estimates:  A Summary of Historical Adjustments."

For information on using these microdata see SHADAC's technical brief, "Using SHADAC-Enhanced Current Population Survey Health Insurance Coverage Microdata Variables."

SHADAC has created an enhanced time series to enable a harmonized view of health insurance coverage over time using the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS).  This was done to account for methodological changes to the CPS. This document provides a Frequently Asked Question format for understanding the estiamtes.  February 2010.

The applied enhancements are outlined in SHADAC's technical brief released in November 2009, available at this link.