WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- About one in six U.S. adults lack health insurance, with 16.3 percent saying they were uninsured at the time they were interviewed, a survey indicates.
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, based on interviews with more than 30,000 Americans during October, indicates the number of uninsured Americans remains unchanged from prior months this year, but is still higher than the number uninsured in November 2008, at 15.8 percent.
However, this number is expected to drop as provisions of healthcare reform -- the Affordable Care Act -- are enacted, such as allowing having parents to retain coverage of children under age 26, prohibiting insurers from canceling coverage if a subscriber gets ill and ending lifetime dollar limits on coverage.
Nonetheless, the more significant measures designed to reduce the millions of the uninsured are not set to go into effect until 2014.
The maximum margin of sampling error is 1 percentage point.
