Prevention
Lack of Health Insurance (Adults 18-64) by County — US Rankings
CDC PLACES 2023 · Age-adjusted prevalence · All 3,144 US counties
The CDC reports this measure as the share of adults aged 18-64 currently without any form of health insurance — distinct from the broader uninsured-rate measure already shown on each county page, which uses Census ACS data and covers all ages. PLACES uses BRFSS, which produces somewhat different estimates: the two should not be expected to match exactly. The county-level pattern is dominated by state Medicaid expansion policy. Counties in non-expansion states cluster at the top of this ranking, particularly along the Texas-Louisiana-Mississippi belt and across the Southeast.
How this ranking is built
Source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Methodology: BRFSS survey responses pooled across years, fitted with a small-area statistical model, age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. Confidence intervals (95%) are shown for each county — wider intervals indicate more uncertainty in the modeled estimate, typically driven by smaller populations.
Lowest Lack of Health Insurance (18-64) Rates — Top 100 Counties
Counties with the lowest reported lack of health insurance (18-64) prevalence — these counties show the most favorable position on this measure.
Best 100 counties for Lack of Health Insurance (18-64).
Highest Lack of Health Insurance (18-64) Rates — Bottom 100 CountiesCounties with the highest reported lack of health insurance (18-64) prevalence.
Worst 100 counties for Lack of Health Insurance (18-64).
What this ranking suggests
Insurance status is the single strongest moderator of every clinical-prevention measure on this site. Counties at the top of the uninsured ranking will tend to show lower cholesterol screening, lower mammography, lower routine checkup, and higher diagnosed-but-untreated chronic disease — patterns that show up across the other PLACES rankings.
Methodology notes & limitations
Estimates are statistical model outputs, not direct measurements. Small counties have wider confidence intervals; treat narrow rank differences in those rows as within-noise. Counties where the underlying population is too small to support modeling are suppressed entirely (about 1% of US counties). All measures are age-adjusted to the 2000 US standard population. The PLACES dataset uses BRFSS self-reported data — self-report introduces known direction-of-bias in some measures (BMI is under-reported; binge drinking is under-reported), but the bias is roughly uniform across counties so ranking comparability is preserved. See the methodology page for full data-pipeline documentation.
Data source: CDC PLACES 2023 release. Measure ID: ACCESS2.