America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) recently released the 2025 version of their Health Coverage: State-to-State document, which has some pretty interesting numbers associated with health insurance coverage in this country. Unfortunately, the only national information the report gives is that 55% of Americans are covered by private insurance; that there are 697,928 people directly employed in the health insurance industry; and an additional 1,301,167 indirectly employed in the industry.
For the record, I’m in the latter figure, as that’s the one that includes insurance brokerages.
Like many insurance people, I’m a bit of a data junkie, although I don’t pretend to be a professional statistician or analyst. I do, however, know how to use Microsoft Excel and how to do data entry quickly and efficiently. So, after ChatGPT failed miserably at automatically creating a chart for me, I manually created a chart of the state-by-state numbers.
Based on the state figures, and on the information on census.gov, I actually got a figure of 58.64% for the number of Americans covered by private insurance. That’s easily attributable to source error, so I can let it go. Some of the other numbers were actually a lot more fascinating. Here’s a sample:
- Among those with private insurance, 10.14% of them had individual policies. 92.98% of those with individual policies received some sort of ACA subsidy.
- Almost two-thirds of those with private insurance are on a self-funded plan. This ranged from 38.99% in California to 83.48% in Indiana. [Note that, because DC and Hawaii have some unique regulations about this, I excluded them as outliers when doing the high/low calculations. They are included when calculating the totals.]
- The next most common type of insurance was a fully insured large group plan, which covered 19.59% of those (about 1 out of every 5) with private insurance.
- Individual policies were just over 10% of private insurance, with a low of 2.17% in New York and a high of 10.37% in North Dakota.
Another particularly interesting aspect of the data was that the percentages were noticeably consistent across states, which you can see in the percentile calculations at the bottom. The highest standard deviation was in self-funded plans, followed by fully insured large group plans, but even it’s still relatively small as such deviations go.
Early insights from looking at these numbers would seem to be the following:
- Group self-funded plans (this includes level funded) are far and away the most common type of private health insurance. The least common is small group fully insured plans (most of which are also going to be subject to ACA provisions).
- Most people with individual plans qualify for a subsidy, suggesting that very few people are using an individual policy strictly as a substitute for a group policy. The state with the highest percentage of individuals on subsidized ACA plans is Florida, which is an outlier at 27.78%.
I’m going to be doing some more digging into this data in the coming weeks to see what other insights are available, and if there are any professional analysts or statisticians out there, I would welcome your insights. Stay tuned!