Health insurance coverage of Californians improved in 1999--but 6.8 million remained uninsured.

The number of uninsured Californians dipped to 6.8 million in 1999, down from 7.3 million in 1998. Despite the good news, more than one in five (22.4%) of the state’s nonelderly residents have no health insurance coverage (Exhibit 1). That is a lower proportion than in 1998 but about the same rate as in 1996 when California had not yet fully recovered from the recession of the early 1990s. This Policy Brief reports basic estimates of health insurance coverage and uninsurance in 1999 and estimates of uninsured children and adults who are eligible for coverage through public programs in California. We focus especially on uninsured adults because of the current policy efforts to expand coverage for this large group. These estimates, based on the latest available data, are drawn from an in-depth report on The State of Health Insurance in California: Recent Trends, Future Prospects, that will be published by the Center in March. Six in 10 nonelderly Californians (60.6%) received health insurance through their own employment or that of a family member in 1999 (Exhibit 1), up from 58.3% in 1998. The growth in employment-based health insurance was largely responsible for the dip in uninsurance. Privately purchased health insurance covered just 4.7% of nonelderly Californians in 1999, about the same as the preceding year. Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid program) and the new Healthy Families Program (California’s version of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) provided coverage to 10.5% of nonelderly Californians in 1999. That proportion is down from 11.0% in 1998 — a slower decline than in the past few years. Just 1.7% had coverage through other public programs, such as Medicare, eligibility for the Veterans Administration health services, or military health services.1