Texas residents least likely to have health insurance

October 31, 2011

Tags: Health Insurance, Insurance, Texas Residents

More Texas residents lack health insurance coverage than residents in any other state in the U.S., said a recent report from Gallup and Healthways.

In the first half of 2011, more than a quarter of state residents did not have health insurance in Texas. To be exact, 27.2 percent Texans lacked health insurance in the first half of the year, Gallup said.

Texas has represented the top of the uninsured spectrum since Gallup and Healthways started tracking health insurance coverage in 2008.

In the most recent survey, Mississippi had the second-highest rate of residents without health insurance at 24.5 percent, followed by Alaska (23.5 percent), Florida (22.6 percent), and Oklahoma (22.5 percent).

Massachusetts residents most likely to be insured

On the opposite end of the spectrum sits Massachusetts. In the first half of 2011, just 5.3 percent of state residents reported having no health insurance in MA.

Health insurance coverage is required in Massachusetts and the state has shown the lowest uninsured rate in the life of the Gallup-Healthways survey (since 2008).

According to Gallup, Vermont residents (9.2 percent uninsured) were the second most likely to have health insurance, followed by Minnesota (9.4 percent), Connecticut (10.3 percent) and Hawaii (10.4 percent).

Number of Americans without health insurance rising

Overall, 16.8 percent of American adults had no health insurance in the first half of 2011, a slight increase from the observed 16.4 percent seen one year earlier in the first half of 2010. This overall uninsured percentage has been increasing steadily since 2008, Gallup said.

Unisured rates continue to be lowest in the Northeast, while the opposite remains true in the South. In this latest survey, 8 of the 10 states with the highest likelihood of residents without health insurance reside in the South.

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