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Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Why are we ahead?
My old buddy The Squid is serving on a consumer's council for a hospital in another state and recently came across an article that said Minnesota had the lowest rate of citizens without health insurance in the country. He wondered if I had any insight into why that was. I don't have any concrete knowledge on the topic but I can take a couple educated guesses. A couple reasons might just be demographics. I'd guess that Minnesota has a higher median income and a lower percentage of minority residents than most states. It also has a pretty low unemployment rate and since unlike most of the world America tends to provide health insurance thru employers that likely leads to more people being insured. I'm not all that familiar with the Minnesota Care low income health insurance program the state runs but I would bet it is a more generous system than most states have (being left over from the days when Minnesota was one of the nation's most progressive states. I'm sure the program has slipped in recent years.) Any body have a more detailed answer for my favorite cephalopod? (By the way, the state at the bottom is Texas. Any surprise there?)
Update
I found this table shortly after posting the above. Maybe I should research first and speculate later since it has a ton of interesting data. Minnesota does not have more people getting state assistance than most other states. All of them have 1-3% getting coverage that way with Minnesota at 1%. Only one other state had more people getting insurance from their employer than we did but 9 states had a higher percentage of employers offering health coverage, all of them in the northeast plus Hawaii and Michigan (labor union effect maybe?) I don't know quite what to make of it all but there is plenty of data for someone who wanted to really dig into it.
