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More than 42 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2013: Census Bureau

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More than 42 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2013: Census Bureau

More than 42 million Americans — 13.4% of the U.S. population — lacked health insurance coverage in 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau said Tuesday in a new survey.

The new findings, though, cannot be compared to coverage rates in 2012 or earlier years due to a revamping of the survey, the Census Bureau said in a statement.

Among other things, the new survey method “is intended to capture health insurance coverage better than the old method, improving respondent recall of when they were covered by health insurance by working backwards through time about specific months of coverage,” the Census Bureau said.

The redesign was made this year to provide a good baseline for coverage in 2013 before key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act took effect this year. That way, the Census Bureau said, the impact of the law can be better assessed after it took effect.

In 2014, for example, ACA-authorized federal premium subsidies were first made available to enable the low-income uninsured to purchase coverage through public exchanges.

Those premium subsidies already have helped make a huge dent in the nation's uninsured rate, a finding that will show up in the 2014 Census Bureau report that will be released next year. In fact, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that just over 8 million people obtained coverage through the exchanges as of the end of March, 85% of whom were eligible for federal premium subsidies.

The Census Bureau survey also found that of the 271.4 million people with health insurance coverage in 2013, the most — 169 million, or 53.9% of the population — had employment-based coverage.

In addition, 54.1 million, or 17.3% of the population, were covered by Medicaid; and 49 million people, or 15.6% of the population, were covered by Medicare.

The Census Bureau also released a different survey whose methodology was not changed in 2013 to provide, among other things, year-to-year comparisons of uninsured rates at the state level.

At 3.7%, Massachusetts had the lowest uninsured rate of any U.S. state, down from 3.9% in 2012. That is largely the result of a 2006 state law — a model in many ways for the 2010 federal health care reform law — in which Massachusetts subsidizes health insurance premiums for the low-income uninsured.

At the other end, Texas has the highest uninsured rate of any state: 22.1% in 2013, down from 22.5% in 2012.

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