July 11, 2007

UCLA: more people insured in 2005 than in 2001

A bit of good news out of the UCLA center for Health Policy Research this morning. The center's annual report on the uninsured in California found that the percentage of the population below the age of 65 without insurance declined from 21.9 percent in 2001 to 20.2 percent in 2005.

In 2005, about 6.5 million Californians were without coverage for all or part of the year. Had the percentage uninsured remained unchanged from four years earlier, another half million people would have been without coverage.

The percentage of people with coverage through the workplace declined during that period, from 57 percent in 2001 to 56.2 percent in 2005. But that slack was picked up (and some of it might actually have been caused by) Medi-Cal and the Healthy Families program for poor children. Those programs increased their share of the population covered from 13.7 percent to 15.8 percent.

Private, individual coverage, meanwhile, also grew, from 4.8 percent in 2001 to 5.5 percent in 2005.

I can't seem to find a number in the 100-plus page report that says how many people had insurance in California in 2001 and in 2005.

But we can do a little guestimating from the numbers that are there.

The report says that in 2005, 6.5 million were uninsured, so that means that about 25.7 million people had insurance that year, not counting the Medicare population.

The state's total population, meanwhile, grew by about 7 percent between 2001 and 2005. If the non-Medicare population grew at that same rate, that means the non-Medicare population was about 30.2 million in 2001. And of those, 78.1 percent had insurance, either private or through the government.

That means 23.6 million Californians had insurance coverage in 2001. And 25.7 million had it in 2005. So, the percentage insured crept up a little bit, and with the state's steady population growth, the raw number insured grew by roughly 2 million. Not bad.

As we've been saying here, the state has problems with its health care system.

But how many people do you think realize that we have added 2 million folks to the ranks of the insured just since 2001?

UPDATE: A reader notes that the numbers are even more interesting if you go back a ways further. According to the same series of reports, in 1994, 23 percent of the state's population was uninsured, and 57 percent were covered through an employer. The number without insurance was 6.6 million. And so, in that period, California added about 6 million residents while the number of uninsured declined. It's my recollection that the percentage covered by employers grew during the dot-com boom, then declined again during the recession earlier in this decade, leaving it back where it started a decade ago.

Posted by dweintraub on July 11, 2007 11:48 AM