After hitting a record low of 7.2% last year, the percentage of the U.S. population without health insurance rose to 8.2% in the first quarter of 2024, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 27.1 million people lacked health insurance in the first three months of the year, an increase of 3.4 million from the same period a year earlier.
The increase represents a reversal of a trend toward greater coverage, driven largely by the expansion of public healthcare programs during the pandemic. Before 2020, the uninsured rate was typically more than 10%, even after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Before the ACA, it was typically over 17%.
The suspension of disenrollments from the Medicaid program during the pandemic was a particularly powerful factor in reducing the uninsured rate, since it eliminated the regular purges performed by states that often included enrollees who were eligible for coverage but who failed to fulfill bureaucratic requirements such as timely paperwork. Now that routine disenrollments have restarted, millions of Medicaid enrollees are once again being eliminated from the program on a regular basis.
The proportion of people in public health programs, including Medicaid and Medicare, fell by two-tenths of a percentage point at the beginning of the year, dropping from 39.9% in the final quarter of 2023 to 39.2% in the first quarter of 2024. The proportion of people with private insurance held steady at 60.8%.
