LANSING – The percentage of Michigan

residents without health insurance dropped significantly in 2014 from 2013,

federal figures show.

The improvement in the number of

residents with insurance also came during the year that more lower-income

residents could sign up for Medicaid coverage under the Healthy Michigan

program.

According to figures released by the

National Center for Health Statistics at the federal Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention, in 2014, 9.3 percent of Michigan’s residents had health

insurance, compared to 12.7 percent without insurance in 2013.

The center called that a significant

change in the number of people with health insurance in Michigan.

The figures are separate from

statistics released also by the center on Wednesday that showed 7 million more

people in the U.S. had health insurance during the first quarter of the year

compared to 2014.

The most recent figures did not show

a state-by-state breakdown of how many more people in each state had insurance,

instead showing that in the Midwest region 10.4 percent of residents did not

have insurance.

Adoption of the Patient Protection

Affordable Care Act by Congress in 2010 as well as many states’ (including

Michigan) decision to expand eligibility for Medicaid is the major reason for

the increased number of covered persons, the center said.

Hawaii is the state with the

smallest percentage of uncovered individuals at 2.5 percent (there was no data

on how that changed from 2013). Texas and Oklahoma both had the highest

percentage at 21.5 percent. Oklahoma saw its percentage drop by 1.8 percentage

points from 2013 while Texas saw it drop by 1.3 percentage points.

Among the Great Lakes states,

Indiana had the highest percentage of persons without health insurance at 13.8

percent (down by 0.8 percentage points from 2013) and Minnesota had the lowest

at 6.5 percent (down 1.6 percentage points). Illinois has 12 percent uninsured,

down 2.2 percentage points; New York then follows with 11 percent uninsured,

unchanged from 2013; Michigan; then Pennsylvania at 9 percent, down 4

percentage points; Ohio at 8.9 percent, down 4.5 percentage points; and

Wisconsin at 7.5 percent, down 1.6 percentage points.

This story was published by Gongwer

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