National and State Changes in Health Insurance Coverage

In addition to the estimates from the Current Population Survey, the Census Bureau produces annual estimates of health insurance coverage from the American Community Survey (ACS).I Though estimates of the uninsured population from these two surveys differ slightly, they rose and fell in parallel between 2009 and 2012.II With the recent redesign of the CPS health insurance questions, the 2013 calendar year estimates from this survey are not directly comparable to 2012 and prior years.
However, the health insurance questions in the ACS have remained unchanged since they were added to the survey in 2008. Therefore, data from the ACS provide a measure of change in health insurance coverage between 2008 and 2013. As measured by the ACS, the uninsured rate increased from 14.6 percent in 2008 to 15.5 percent in 2010, and then fell again between 2010 and 2013. Between 2012 and 2013, the percentage of people who did not have health insurance decreased by 0.2 percentage points to 14.5 percent