National Health Interview Survey

Exploring U.S. health trends, conditions, and behaviors from the CDC's longest-running household health survey.

The NHIS is a nationally representative, cross-sectional household survey conducted continuously since 1957. Each year, approximately 30,000–40,000 adults are interviewed in person about their health status, access to care, and insurance coverage. All estimates shown here are weighted using IPUMS-harmonized sampling weights to reflect the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population, with standard errors computed using the Taylor series linearization method to account for the complex, stratified, clustered survey design. Shaded bands represent 95% confidence intervals. Estimates with a relative standard error exceeding 30% or based on fewer than 30 unweighted observations are suppressed per NCHS data presentation standards.

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Key Findings, 2019–2024

Cost-related care delays rebounded in 2024. After declining from 7.3% in 2019 to a low of 5.7% in 2022, the share of adults who delayed or went without medical care due to cost rose back to 7.0% in 2024, nearly returning to pre-pandemic levels.
Medicaid enrollment peaked in 2023. Medicaid coverage among adults reached 17.1% in 2023 — the highest point in this period — before declining to 15.6% in 2024, consistent with the resumption of Medicaid eligibility redeterminations following the end of the pandemic-era continuous enrollment provision.
Nonmetropolitan areas had the highest Medicaid enrollment. Medicaid coverage in nonmetropolitan areas reached 23.0% in 2023, compared to 12.0% in large fringe metro (suburban) areas — a gap of 11 percentage points. This disparity persisted across all years.
Adults without Medicaid delayed care at higher rates than enrollees. Adults without Medicaid — a group that includes the privately insured, Medicare beneficiaries, and the uninsured — consistently reported more cost-related delays (6.1–7.7%) than Medicaid enrollees (3.1–5.3%). This likely reflects Medicaid's minimal cost-sharing requirements, which reduce financial barriers to care.
Medicaid enrollees were more likely to have a usual source of care. Across all years, approximately 93–95% of Medicaid enrollees reported having a usual place for care, compared to 89–90% of non-enrollees.

Data Sources

Data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), conducted by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Accessed via IPUMS NHIS.

National Center for Health Statistics. National Health Interview Survey. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis/index.htm.

Lynn A. Blewett, Julia A. Rivera Drew, Andrew Fenelon, Miriam L. King, Kari C.W. Williams, Daniel Backman, Etienne Breton, Grace Cooper, and Stephanie Richards. IPUMS Health Surveys: National Health Interview Survey, Version 8.1 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D071.V8.1.

IPUMS NHIS, University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org.

R Core Team (2024). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.