Updated on November 1, 2024

The U.S. Census Bureau publishes annual statistics on economic well-being using the official poverty measure and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). This paper presents estimates of a third measure, the Health Inclusive Poverty Measure (HIPM) which adapts the SPM to incorporate a value of health insurance into poverty measurement (Korenman and Remler 2016; Korenman, Remler, and Hyson 2019; Creamer 2024). In 2023, the national HIPM rate was 14.8 percent, an increase of 0.6 percentage points from 2022 (14.3 percent). The HIPM rate was 1.9 percentage points higher than the SPM (12.9 percent) and 3.7 percentage points higher than the official+ poverty measure (11.1 percent). In terms of policy, Medicare and Medicaid removed 21.6 million and 15.3 million people respectively from HIPM poverty, second and third to Social Security as the largest anti-poverty programs. A primary factor to the difference in poverty rates across measures is that the uninsured have no health insurance resources to help offset their health insurance needs.