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Those Without Kansas Health Insurance by County

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released county-level information about health insurance status in 2005 for every county in the United States. The following map shows the percentage of nonelderly Kansans who were uninsured in 2005 in each Kansas county. For example, 29.5 percent of Cheyenne County's nonelderly residents were uninsured, or 635 of its 2,155 residents under age 65.

Counties with large populations, such as Johnson County and Sedgwick County, had the highest numbers of uninsured residents. However, they also had among the lowest percentages of uninsured residents. For example, 41,381 nonelderly residents of Johnson County were uninsured. But this represented only 8.9 percent of the county's nonelderly population.

Counties with the highest percentages of nonelderly uninsured residents tend to be more sparsely populated. For example, Haskell County had 2,686 nonelderly residents in 2005 and 981 of them (26.8 percent) were uninsured. The counties with a large percentage of nonelderly residents who were uninsured are located primarily in the western part of the state, with the largest concentration in southwest Kansas.

Southwest Kansas is where many of the state's Hispanic residents live and work. Hispanic Kansans are more likely than other groups to be uninsured. One of the contributing factors may be rural/urban disparities in the availability of employer-sponsored insurance.

A 2005 study published in the Journal of Rural Health explored the reasons why many rural areas in the United States have relatively high numbers of uninsured residents. It found among other things that urban workers were more likely to be offered health insurance by their employers than workers in rural areas.

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