More Americans Covered by Health Insurance in 2020, CDC Says

Health Insurance: U.S. health-insurance coverage improved last year, with more than 90% of Americans on a plan, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

According to preliminary estimates released Tuesday by the CDC’s National Center of Health Statistics, the number of uninsured people in 2020 will drop to 31.6 million, or 9.7% of the population. In 2019, 33.2 million, or 10.3%, were uninsured.

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The study defined those people as uninsured if they did not have any private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, state, government or military plans, or were not in the Children’s Health Insurance Program. They were also considered uninsured if they only had a private plan that paid for one type of service, such as accident or dental care.

Among adults aged 18-64, 13.9% were uninsured. More than two-thirds of this age group had private health insurance coverage and 20.5% had public coverage.

Health Insurance: Among children 17 and under, 5.1% were uninsured.

The percentage of adults over age 65 with public insurance decreased slightly from 96% in 2019 to 95.9%. About 67.5% of adults aged 18-64 were expected to have private coverage in 2020, compared to 66.8% a year earlier. In 2020, only 3.8% of individuals under age 65 had exchange-based coverage.

The CDC said the results still need to undergo final data editing. In previous years, the difference between the initial and final figures was usually less than 0.1 percentage point. However, the data for 2020 also faced a change in procedures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Nearly 1.6 million more Americans had some form of health insurance coverage last year despite the COVID-19 crisis, early data from a US government office showed, mainly due to increased enrollment in government-sponsored health plans. Got help from

Estimates based on a household survey by the Statistics Division of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed Tuesday that a total of 31.6 million, or 9.7% of Americans of all ages, were uninsured last year, down from 33.2 million in 2019.