America Magazine
By: Editorial Board
In November the Georgetown Center for Children and Families announced that the number of uninsured children in the United States went up for the first time in nearly a decade. While 7.6 million children were uninsured in 2008, by 2016 that figure had dropped to 3.6 million. But in 2017, 300,000 children lost coverage. The authors of the study cannot say with certainty why this happened, but their research suggests a few possibilities. Joan Alker, one of the authors of the report, writes that about 75 percent of children who lost coverage in 2017 live in states where Medicaid coverage was not expanded through the Affordable Care Act, like Texas, Florida and Georgia.
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