United Hospital Fund Analysis Examines State- and Citywide Differences in Insurance Coverage and Uninsurance

Analysis Finds New York’s Uninsurance Rate, Despite Recession, Virtually Unchanged from 2008 to 2009, Bucking a National Trend of Increasing Uninsurance

Release Date: 09.09.2011
Contact: rdeluna@uhfnyc.org
Contact Phone: 212 494 0733

In the new edition of the United Hospital Fund’s annual chartbook series—Health Insurance Coverage in New York, 2009—a larger, richer data source has quantified differences in insurance coverage and uninsurance around New York State and within New York City. For the first time, data are broken down into 14 separate regions across New York State, including the five boroughs of New York City; within the city itself, estimates are provided for 55 separate neighborhoods.

This special report also looks at New York from a national perspective in 2009 and finds that the state’s rate of uninsurance, 12.9 percent, compares favorably to the national uninsurance rate, 17.1 percent. Further, while that national rate of uninsurance increased by .7 percent from 2008 to 2009, the rate in New York State was unchanged, despite a lingering national recession. In the state, a 1.3 percent increase in Medicaid and CHIP enrollment—reflecting the commitment of New York’s policymakers to public insurance programs—helped offset a 1.4 percent decline in employer-sponsored insurance over this period.

“This report provides an important snapshot of the insured and uninsured in New York, detailing income, employment status, age, and other demographic information,” said Peter Newell, director of the Fund’s Health Insurance Project and one of the authors of the report, which was prepared with the Urban Institute. “Taking a look at income brackets from 2008 to 2009, as an example, we found that significant drops in employer-sponsored coverage have occurred among the nonelderly with incomes between 200 percent and 300 percent of the federal poverty level, a clear target of federal Affordable Care Act subsidies for coverage through health benefit exchanges.”

Among the findings in the new report:

•    In 2009, rates of employer-sponsored insurance in New York State (excluding New York City) ranged from a high of 72.3 percent in the Nassau/Suffolk County region to a low of 61.7 percent in the northernmost region (Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence Counties).
•    Rates of employer-sponsored insurance in New York City were lower on average, but wider ranging—from 38.0 percent in the Bronx to 68.4 percent in Staten Island.
•    Bronx residents were twice as likely to be covered by Medicaid/CHIP (41.5 percent) as Staten Island residents (18.2 percent).
•    At the neighborhood level, uninsurance rates for New York City nonelderly in 2008 and 2009 ranged from a low of 4.9 percent on the South Shore of Staten Island to a high of 32.2 percent in Jackson Heights, Queens.
•    In Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay/Gravesend was the only neighborhood of 15 surveyed with an uninsurance rate for the nonelderly below 9 percent, while Bushwick had a rate of over one in four uninsured.
•    Four of ten Manhattan neighborhoods had nonelderly uninsurance rates below 9 percent, less than half the rate in Manhattan’s East Harlem (21.9 percent).
•    Not a single New York City neighborhood had a rate of uninsurance for children of greater than 10 percent in 2008 and 2009.

“Approximately 2.2 million New Yorkers lacked insurance coverage in 2009, and more than one-third of these uninsured were eligible for public programs,” noted Jim Tallon, president of the United Hospital Fund. “As the State implements more components of federal health care reform, which includes helping enroll individuals without health insurance, the regional component of this analysis will be a valuable guide, facilitating the blending of state policy with genuine sensitivity to local conditions.”

Health Insurance Coverage in New York, 2009  was prepared collaboratively by a team that included Juliana Macri and Genevieve M. Kenney from the Urban Institute, and Andrew Detty and Peter Newell from the United Hospital Fund. The full report is available on the Fund’s website.

About the United Hospital Fund: The United Hospital Fund is a health services research and philanthropic organization whose primary mission is to shape positive change in health care for the people of New York.

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