News: Uninsured rate falls to 8.3%, experts say to watch for COVID protections ending

The United States uninsured rate fell to 8.3%, a record-low according to research published by Congressional Budget Office (CBO) officials. Temporary policies created during the COVID-19 pandemic to increase insurance protections are a large contributing factor. The uninsured rate is expected to increase as such protections begin to expire, however, MedPage Today reported.

CBO projects the uninsured rate will increase to 10.1% by 2033, which is still lower than 2019 prior to the pandemic (about 12%). Demographic and macroeconomic changes are expected to affect these trends in coverage; people with incomes 150% below the federal poverty line, for instance, are more likely to be uninsured than those with incomes above 400% of the federal poverty line. Lower-income people are most often covered by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) when they do have coverage, and higher-income people are most often covered by insurance offered by their employer.

“Throughout the 2023-33 period, employment-based coverage will remain the largest source of health insurance, with average monthly enrollment between 155 million and 159 million,” said Caroline Hanson, PhD, principal analyst at the CBO, in the article.

Medicaid enrollment has grown by 16.1 million enrollees since 2019 because of instated laws, but this is likely to change now that an act of Congress has allowed states since April 1 to begin ending continuous eligibility rules and start disenrolling people from Medicaid and CHIP. Eventually, 15.5 million people will be transitioned out of Medicaid, with 6.2 million of them projected to go uninsured.

Editor’s note: To read MedPage Today’s coverage of this story, click here. To read all of CBO’s findings, click here.