Health insurance is an important financial backstop for families. An infant or toddler with a serious injury or illness can incur medical expenses that are overwhelming, particularly for families with low incomes. While health insurance coverage for this age group is nearly universal, some groups of children are still uncovered.
The denominator is the number of children ages 0-2 living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. The numerator is the number of children ages 0-2 living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line that did not have health insurance at the time of the interview.
This indicator can be disaggregated by race/ethnicity and urbanicity. Race/ethnicity: Survey respondents report the infant or toddler’s race and ethnicity. Respondents can select one or more of many racial categories or fill in their race. The Census Bureau then assigns each respondent into one of nine categories (American Indian and Alaska Native, Black/African American, Chinese, Japanese, Other Asian or Pacific Islander, Other race, Two major races, Three or more major races, and White). Ethnicity is asked as a separate question. Responses of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Other Hispanic are coded as Hispanic, regardless of response to the race item. With these categories and ethnicity, we created seven mutually exclusive race/ethnicity categories: Hispanic, Non-Hispanic Asian/PI, Non-Hispanic Black, Non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native, Non-Hispanic Other, Non-Hispanic Multiple Races, and Non-Hispanic White. Urbanicity: Urban residence is defined as living within a metropolitan area. Metropolitan areas include central/principal cities, metro areas outside of central/principal cities, and metro areas with central/principal city status indeterminable. Non-metropolitan areas are areas outside of metropolitan areas. Cases whose metropolitan status is indeterminable or mixed are excluded from the urbanicity subgroup analysis. We relied on ACS data that do not include estimates for Puerto Rico for the urbanicity indicator subgroups.
Source:
Ruggles, S., Flood, S., Sobek, M., Brockman, D., Cooper, G., Richards, S., & Schouweiler, M. (2023). American Community Survey 2020, five-year estimates. (IPUMS USA: Version 13.0) [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V13.0