Their Glass is Still Half-Empty: More Details on Uninsured Women

by Lisa Codispoti, Senior Advisor
and Brigette Courtot, Policy Analyst
National Women’s Law Center

This post is part of a weekly series on Women and Health Reform.

Last week we wrote about the Census Bureau’s recent release of 2007 data on health insurance coverage in the United States. On the simplest level, the news looks positive, with fewer uninsured women—and uninsured Americans in general—in 2007 than in 2006. 

But since when was anything about health insurance simple?  The message became more complex when we found that the 2007 decline in uninsurance was only due to an increase in the number of people with public health insurance.  We summed up last week’s blog post discussion on this by warning readers not to be fooled by the seemingly positive news – our fight for progressive health reform is far from over!

Now that we’ve had another week to work with the Census data, we have found even more evidence of women’s need for comprehensive health reform. For certain groups of women, the news on 2007 insurance rates is not even seemingly positive. Things just went from bad to worse. Period. The data shows just who lost out:

• Women who work part-time:  For women who work part-time (i.e. less than 35 hours per week for all jobs), uninsurance rates continue to increase.  Twenty percent of women who work part-time were uninsured in 2007, compared to just 13 percent of women working full-time.
• Young Women:  For the last five years, uninsurance has increased among young women ages 18-24.  Overall, about 18 percent of women are uninsured, but the proportion of uninsured women in this age group is significantly higher, at over 26 percent.
• Poor Women:  In spite of the increase in public coverage, the proportion of uninsured women living below the federal poverty level (those whose income was $10,200 or less in 2007) continued its steady increase from 2006 to 2007.  Over forty percent of women at this income level were uninsured last year, more than twice the rate for women overall.
• Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander Women:  For these women, rates of uninsurance increased from 17.2 to 18.5 percent from 2006 to 2007.

Sure, uninsurance decreased for women overall, but in this case the devil is in the details. All women did not benefit equally from last year’s decrease in the uninsured – for some, the glass is still decidedly half-empty. We’ve said it before. We’ll say it again: we need health reform that will provide high-quality affordable health coverage for everyone.