A new brief from the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative examining newly-released data from the 2014 Uniform Data System (UDS) shows how the Affordable Care Act is changing insurance coverage and health care in the nation’s most medically underserved urban and rural communities. Examining data collected from nearly 1,300 federally funded health centers operating in over 9,000 locations, the report shows that between 2013 and 2014, the total number of patients served increased by over 1.1 million patients, or 5%, and the number of health center patients with health insurance increased 2.3 million or nearly 17 percent. Meanwhile, the number of uninsured patients declined steeply by 1.2 million or 16 percent. The total number of patients served at federally funded health centers has almost tripled since 1996, from slightly more than 8 million to nearly 23 million patients served in 2014.
The brief is authored by Jessica Sharac, Peter Shin and Sara Rosenbaum.