EconoFact Chats

EconoFact Chats


The State of Health Insurance in America

February 23, 2025

The United States is an outlier in health insurance coverage. Almost all other high-income countries have near-universal coverage, while almost 10% of the non-elderly US population is uninsured. How did this come to be? And what can policymakers do to improve access to health insurance? Mark Shepard joins EconoFact Chats to discuss these questions.

Mark is an associate professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.