The battle between advocates and opponents of the federal health-care law is often chock-full of macroscopic statistics and data points. But what about looking at health care on a smaller scale?
Thanks to an interactive infographic below from the consumer finance Web site ValuePenguin, you can take a look at how your own county measures up when it comes to what percentage of the population is insured, how many companies are offering plans on the exchange, and how it all compares to every other county in the country.
Data for the tool come from the Census, HealthCare.gov and state insurance exchanges.
ValuePenguin.com: Visualizing the Uninsured And The Affordable Care Act
You're probably going to lose some of your afternoon playing around with the tool and looking at the map across different metrics. Here are a few key findings that stuck out to us:
* There appears to be a higher concentration of counties with a high percentage of uninsured residents under 65 in Texas, Montana and across the South compared with the rest of the map. On the other end of the spectrum, the upper Midwest and the Northeast tend to have a higher concentration of counties where most of the population is insured.
* Massachusetts has a high level of coverage. The state has an individual coverage mandate.
* The number of companies offering plans on the exchange is high in the Pacific Northwest (especially Oregon) and in New York and Massachusetts.
* The counties in Texas that border Mexico are some of the least insured parts of the country. More than 35 percent of the under-65 population is uninsured in many of these counties.
What else stands out or looks interesting to you? The comments section awaits your input!
