More than a quarter (26.3 percent) of Texans do not own health insurance, giving Texas the lowest rate of health insureds in the nation, according to 2010 data released yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau; Massachusetts, Hawaii and the District of Columbia represented the states with the highest rates of health insureds, respectively.
Florida (25.3 percent), Nevada (25.1 percent), New Mexico (22.6 percent) and Georgia (21.9 percent) round out the low end of the results.
Thanks to the now-famous universal health care enactment by former Governor Mitt Romney in 2006, Massachusetts, meanwhile, boasted a 5.2 percent rate of uninsureds, nearly half as much as Hawaii (8.9 percent), D.C. (9 percent), Vermont (9.7 percent) and Minnesota (10.3 percent), the next closest states.
This paints a similar picture to recent years. Texas has held down the bottom spot since 2006, when the Census Bureau began detailing such information, while Massachusetts, Hawaii and D.C. have held down the top three for the last three years.
Geographically speaking, there is a stark line drawn between regions of the contiguous United States with more than 16 percent uninsured rates and those with less than that. The southern and western United States represented the areas of with the highest rates of uninsureds—this includes Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana. Aside from those three exceptions, any states east of Wyoming down to Colorado and north of Oklahoma over to North Carolina have rates below 16 percent.
Results include citizens younger than age 65.
