U.S. Census figures released on Sept. 9 show that the U.S. has made little progress on poverty and healthcare coverage for children. Though child poverty plummeted in 2021 to 5.2 percent thanks to the passage of the Expanded Child Tax Credit, that rate more than doubled between 2021 and 2023.
The new figures show no significant change from 2023 to 2024. Roughly 13.4 percent of all children still lived in poverty, while about 4.7 million total children, or 6.1 percent of children, had no health insurance.
The increase in the uninsurance rate was “driven by a decline in the number of children covered by Medicaid and occurs on the cusp of record-level cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) contained in H.R. 1,” said First Focus on Children. H.R. 1 also cuts $200 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus, stated that the figures are “disappointing but certainly not surprising.”
BRUCE LESLEY; [email protected]
Lesley is president of First Focus on Children.
Lesley told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “We had anticipated that healthcare numbers would be worse and that poverty would be static––and that’s what we see in these numbers. The bigger problem is what is going to happen moving forward because of the big giant bill, which will change all of this. We can see this as a baseline; things will go downhill from here.
“When CHIP was passed in 1997, the uninsured rate for children was 15 or 16 percent. In conjunction with Medicaid, CHIP has been a wildly successful program and has helped to cut the uninsured rate down to less than 5 percent. There was a year or two where the uninsured rate for Black kids was equal to or less than it was for white kids. At least on this metric of insurance coverage, there was racial equity. But the new Census numbers show a growing racial divergence and an overall increase in the uninsured rate. We’re at 6 percent now, and Hispanic and Black kids saw a sizable increase in their uninsurance rates, while white kids saw a slight decrease.”
First Focus highlighted that Hispanic children had the highest uninsured rate in 2024 at 10.1 percent and that the overall uninsured rate is highest for children in the South at 8.4 percent, compared to just 4.3 percent in the West.
These numbers are “attributable to the ongoing [post-pandemic] Medicaid unwinding,” Lesley said. “Some states enacted positive policies after the public health emergency was lifted and went out of their way to keep kids covered, while other states cut them off. We see big regional differences here. The South is horrible, and a lot of that is due to Texas, Arkansas, and Florida cutting everybody off even when kids were still eligible. Whereas states like Oregon were going out of their way and we didn’t see a decline in coverage due to the unwinding. But now we are going to impose greater burdens on getting and keeping Medicaid coverage, so these numbers will exacerbate moving forward.
“When it comes to poverty rates for kids, we anticipated that poverty would be at about that level, 13.4 percent. But in 2021, it was down to 5.2 percent. So there’s been basically a 150 percent increase in child poverty since 2021. That’s not what we should be doing. When Congress let the Child Tax Credit expire, they really failed kids. By cutting SNAP, we’re going to see that number go up, and it’s horrifying.
“We are introducing a bill in a week or so that tries to establish a child poverty target, to cut child poverty in half. The U.K. did this under Tony Blair. Poverty is a policy decision, so once the government put its mind to it, they dramatically cut child poverty in less than 10 years. Canada did the same in three years. And we did it in the U.S. in one year in 2021. It’s completely doable and sustainable.
“This is a goal that most Americans would agree with. Even though Democrats and Republicans might not agree on how to get there, we should start taking steps to make sure our policies don’t exacerbate child poverty. It’s important to make this target to hold policymakers to the goal and create some sort of accountability.”