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Changes in New Hampshire Individual Health Insurance Status

The New Hampshire Center for Public Policy demonstrated that tracking the portion of self-pay admissions at New Hampshire hospitals monitors changes in the insurance status of New Hampshire residents in a more accurate and timely way than surveys of the population, and at essentially no cost. Surveys would still be needed to determine attitudes toward health care and health insurance, reasons for lack of insurance and other issues.

The most often cited survey data (from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey) is available for New Hampshire through the year 2005. The CPS showed a 0.4% decline in the New Hampshire uninsured population from 2004 to 2005, which matches the Center's Index of Uninsurance through those same years (see following table). Data from the CPS is not yet available at the state level for the years 2006 and 2007.

Recently the New Hampshire Department of Insurance examined specific information on Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and deductible insurance in the CY2006 supplemental report data, to determine whether an increase in high deductible could explain the increase in New Hampshire self-pay hospital admissions. According to their analysis about 1.5% of the member months were under insurance products considered (by the Internal Revenue Service) high deductible health plans, and total premiums for this population were just less than 1% of the total. Therefore it seems unlikely that high deductible health plans are a substantial factor, in the increase in self-pay admissions, even if patients with high deductible health plans are erroneously considered "uninsured."

According to a recent report from the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the number of Americans lacking health insurance was 43.6 million in 2006, a 6 percent increase from 2005.

The New Hampshire index of those lacking health insurance presented above for New Hampshire appears to mirror the national trend.

The New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies appreciates the assistance of the New Hampshire Hospital Association in providing us the data used to create this index. For more information on the index, see our report, "Monitoring Changes in Health Insurance Coverage," at http://www.nhpolicy.org/.