More Young Adults Now Have Health Insurance

A federal survey, known as the National Health Interview Survey, of 35,000 households shows that the share of young adults without health insurance fell by one-sixth in 2011 from the previous year.The share of people ages 19 to 25 who lacked health insurance fell to 27.9 percent, down from 33.9 percent in 2010, or about 1.6 million fewer uninsured people. This is the largest annual decline for any age group since the Centersfor DiseaseControl and Prevention (CDC) began collecting the data in 1997.

The study’s author, Matthew Broaddus, a research analyst at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the increased coverage for young people was almost certainly due to a provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until their 26th birthday. Joseph Antos, a healthcare policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that the provision of the new law was the only plausible explanation forthe increase. Before the dependents’ provision took effect, young adults were typically forced off their parents’plan at 18 or 21, after high school or college. The CDC data for 2011 captured the first full year that the provision allowed young people to stay on their parents’ policies. The findings of the study are in line with a study released in June by theNationalBureau of EconomicResearch, which found that young adults were a third more likely to be on their parents’ employer policies since the provision on dependents went into effect.

The share of all Americans without health insurance stood at 15.1 pecent in 2011, or about 46 million people, which is down from 16 percent in 2010, but above the level in 2007 when 14.5 percent of Americans lacked health insurance.