More than 8% of Americans did not have health insurance during the first months of 2024, according to new survey findings published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, breaking a streak of record-low uninsured rates following the COVID-19 pandemic.
An estimated 27.1 million Americans of all ages were uninsured through March, according to the quarterly figures published Tuesday. The CDC publishes estimates on insurance coverage every three months based on results from the agency’s National Health Interview Survey.
The increase amounts to 3.4 million more Americans who did not have health insurance during the first quarter of this year compared to the same time in 2023, the CDC estimates, when around 7.7% of Americans were uninsured.
Future rounds of the survey will paint a clearer picture of how high the uninsured rate will rise this year. The increases so far are not large enough to be statistically significant, said Christy Hagen of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Tuesday’s figures come after years of record-low rates of uninsured Americans that Biden administration officials had touted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the proportion of uninsured people fell below 8% in 2023 for four straight quarters.
Experts and health officials have credited the record low uninsured rates in large part to some pandemic-era changes to health insurance. Before 2020, the nation’s uninsured rate had peaked at more than 10%.
One big factor had been a pause during the COVID-19 pandemic of states reverifying the eligibility of residents covered by Medicaid, effectively suspending the “churn” that purges many otherwise eligible enrollees from state health insurance rolls.
The process of resuming eligibility checks after the pandemic — a mammoth bureaucratic undertaking dubbed Medicaid “unwinding” — is slated to wrap up in almost all states by this month.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimated in June that the rates of Americans covered by health insurance were likely to worsen back to pre-pandemic levels by 2026, after declines in Medicaid enrollment and the end of temporary subsidies.
Recent estimates by the Congressional Budget Office have also forecast that the U.S. uninsured rate would worsen over the coming years. In addition to the end of pandemic-era insurance policies, the CBO’s modelers pointed to a surge in immigration as another factor that would likely drive up uninsured rates.