The number of uninsured Americans has risen significantly over the past year:  from 25 million in March of 2023 to 27 million in March of 2024, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with the uninsured rate rising from a record low of 7.7 percent to 8.2 percent.

The rise in the number of uninsured people results primarily from individuals who became eligible for Medicaid during the COVID-19 public health emergency, a period during which states could not redetermine eligibility without losing some of the additional funding they were receiving from the federal government during that period.

Many of the people who have lost their Medicaid coverage have found private health insurance – especially on state and federal health exchanges and with the help of Affordable Care Act subsidies.

Any increase in the number of uninsured people will pose a special challenge for community safety-net hospitals because those providers serve areas with especially large numbers of low-income residents who are more likely than others to lose their health insurance.

Learn more about how the Medicaid unwinding process has affected the number of people who have health insurance from the STAT article “Millions of people became uninsured as Medicaid programs cut coverage, new data show.”  Find more data from this Axios report and learn where the uninsured live from another Axios article.