Did the Uninsured Increase by 7 Million?

Democrats have embraced a new talking point: “7 million Americans have become uninsured” under President Donald Trump. That’s backed up by a Gallup survey. So far, one other measure has picked up a statistical change in the uninsured rate, but others haven’t.

We’ll go through the numbers.

In September, we explored some possible reasons the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index showed a larger increase in the uninsured than other measures — in particular, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey. At the time, Gallup-Sharecare had found an estimated 3.2 million more American adults were uninsured, comparing the fourth quarter of 2016 with the fourth quarter of 2017. The NHIS, meanwhile, showed an increase of 700,000 people from 2016 to 2017, a change it called “not significantly different.”

Now, the gap appears to be growing, with the now-named a 7 million increase in the uninsured from the third quarter of 2016 to the fourth quarter of 2018, and the latest NHIS numbers — which only cover the first six months of 2018 — again no statistically significant change. The different time frames are likely one reason for the disparate results.