Texas Home to Most People Living Without Health Insurance

The state of Texas has been found to be home to the highest number of residents living without any form of health insurance.

According to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau, 1 in 4 people living in the state of Texas are living without health insurance, numbers similar to the states of Florida and New Mexico.

Overall the report, which documents numbers of uninsured people in American states and counties, found that 1 in 6 people under the age of 65 in the year of 2005 living in America was living without any form of health insurance, a number that jumped to 1 in 3 for Hispanics.

In the state of Texas in 2005, home to one of the worst resident to insured resident ratios, 40.5% of Hispanics under the age of 65 had no health insurance compared to just over 24% of blacks and 15.8% of whites.

This trend held true for the majority of states, seeing the vast amount of Hispanic residents lacking health insurance.

The state to have the highest amount of uninsured white residents was Oklahoma, standing at just over 18 percent.

“This is not an issue of people not working, it is an issue of working families not being about to afford coverage,” Rea Panares of the health care advocacy group Families USA tells WebMD. “We are seeing that about 80% of people who are uninsured have a full time worker in the family.”

At the other end of the scale, the state of Minnesota was found to have the lowest rate of uninsured residents, at just over 9 percent.