Utah Health Insurance Coverage Estimate

Estimate of Health Insurance Coverage in Utah

As mentioned previously, health insurance comes from three sources: government, employers, and commercial insurers. The Insurance Department has attempted to estimate how much of the state is insured by each source of health insurance. The estimate is for comprehensive health insurance coverage only (also known as major medical).

Caution should be used interpreting these results, however, as multiple data sources with differing methods were required to create this estimate. For example, membership data for government sponsored health benefit plans was obtained from the Utah Department of Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Membership data for commercial health insurance was obtained from the Utah Accident & Health Survey, a survey conducted annually by the Insurance Department.

The estimate for the uninsured was obtained from the Utah Health Status Survey. This survey is believed to be a more accurate estimate of the uninsured in Utah than the Census Bureau estimates developed from the Current Population Survey. The Current Population Survey tends to overestimate the number of uninsured in small states like Utah. The Utah Health Status Survey has a larger sample size and is a better measure of the uninsured for Utah.

Finally, membership for employer sponsored self-funded benefit plans was estimated using the best information available to the Insurance Department. Currently, there is no single source of self-funded membership data for Utah. As a result, a "best guess" estimate was created using a combination of membership data obtained from government sponsored plans, large self-funded employers, commercial health insurers who administer self-funded health benefit plans, and data from the Utah Health Status Survey. The result is imperfect, but it does provide an estimate of the self-funded population.

Given these limitations, the Insurance Department estimates that seventeen percent of Utah residents were covered by government plans, forty percent were covered by self-funded plans, thirty-two percent were covered by commercial health insurance, and ten point six percent were uninsured.