The rate of adults without health insurance in Texas was nearly twice as high as the rest of the U.S. from 2013 to 2015, according to a new report released today by Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy and the Episcopal Health Foundation.
The report found since the onset of the Affordable Care Act's 2014 enrollment season in fall 2013, the adult uninsured rate in the U.S. fell by 41 percent, while Texas' uninsured rate dropped just 21 percent during the same time.
"The good news is that Texans, like all Americans, saw meaningful drops in the rates of uninsured since the ACA began," Elena Marks, president and CEO of the EHF and a nonresident health policy fellow at the Baker Institute, said in a news release. "However, Texas still has the most uninsured adults in the nation, and Texans with the lowest incomes continue to get health-insurance coverage at a rate far below anyone else."
The Health Reform Monitoring Survey is a quarterly survey of adults ages 18-64 that began in 2013. Data used in the report was extracted from the HRMS surveys in Texas administered between September 2013 and September 2015.
Here are five other findings from the report.
1. From 2013 to 2015, the uninsured rate among low-income adults in Texas dropped 15 percent — the smallest decline of any group in the state, the report found.
2. Nearly half of Texans with household incomes below $27,000 a year remain uninsured.
3. Federal subsidies designed to help people purchase ACA marketplace health insurance plans are not available to Texans with household incomes below $27,000 a year, according to the report.
4. From 2013 to 2015, researchers found the rate of adults without health insurance in Texas dropped from 24 percent to 19 percent.
5. The report found the rate of uninsured Hispanics in Texas was 39 percent in 2013, and dropped to 29 percent in 2015. This large decrease among Hispanics was slightly more than African Americans, and almost twice as much as whites in Texas.
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