The number of U.S. residents without health insurance rose by 2 million during Donald Trump’s presidency and fell by 3.3 million under Joe Biden’s. That decrease led to the lowest rate of residents without health insurance in U.S. history. Under Trump, meanwhile, 39 states saw increases in their uninsured rates.
JEREMY LINDENFELD; jlindenfeldphoto@gmail.com, @jeremotographs
Lindenfeld is a California-based reporter covering inequality, climate change, and labor organizing for Capital & Main.
An analysis, published by Capital & Main, used Census data from the American Community Survey (ACS). The latest ACS numbers are from 2022. Lindenfeld told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “The data from two years into the Biden administration tells us that the uninsured population shrank by over 3 million people in those first two years. When Trump first came into office, he adopted a shrinking uninsured population. The population had been shrinking ever since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. Every single year of Trump’s presidency, the uninsured population grew.”
Lindenfeld says that mainstream media are missing this story. Fifty-seven percent of Americans describe health care affordability as a “very big problem,” according to a Pew Research Center survey from May. And health care, Lindenfeld writes, is “especially unaffordable for the roughly 27 million people who still lack insurance. That unaffordability makes uninsured people more likely to skip or delay medical treatment, leading to worse health care outcomes, according to a KFF report.”
Lindenfeld said: “Health insurance isn’t a sexy topic right now. There needs to be more coverage about this. Most of the [recent] political conversation around health care has been about drug price negotiations and relieving medical debt. Those are interesting topics, but undergirding a lot of what makes health care unaffordable is insurance… Marginalized populations have historically been covered less by health insurance.”
Kamala Harris has not yet said anything about these data. “Neither candidate has explicit policy proposals when it comes to health insurance. That’s something I hope changes,” Lindenfeld added. “Trump ostensibly walked back his commitment to repealing the ACA. But if his past record is anything to go off of, we should expect a weakening of the ACA.
“The uninsured rate has hit record lows [under Biden], but the policy fight isn’t close to over. Because people are being disenrolled through the Medicaid unwinding, it is possible that the uninsured population will rise. Absent federal action, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that millions more people could be uninsured within 10 years.”
