Introduction
The visualization shares information on the population without health insurance during 2008 to 2015 across all states in the United States. Be it treatments, medications, consultations with doctors, hospitalization – all these charges could be wisely managed by selecting the right insurance package based on medical history. Being uninsured in a country like United States is a nightmare, when your hard-earned money goes into drain when you need any kind of medical attention!
Audience: Health Insurance Providers to ensure maximum coverage of the US population
Claim: Despite of free medical care, people prefer fines over premiums. If unable to pay medical bills, it can be waived off if a person is declared bankrupt or income is too low and so on. Hence, targeting right set of of population becomes important inorder to match them with the coverage that suits their requirements.
Analysis
What I like about the visualization?
- Doesn’t require human intervention to see the changes over the years (but it doesn’t serve the purpose to the user)
- Data is trustworthy.
- The color palette gives it a good look and feel.
What I don’t like about it?
- It’s too fast, just before the user could collect any information it changes.
- Lacks depth.
What would make it more useful?
It shares very limited information with respect to population without health insurance coverage. It lacks depth as which age group, race and ethnicity are insured/uninsured. Some pointers on how it could be improved.
Addition of filters: Reveals more insights state-wise.
- By Age-group
- By Gender
- By marital status
- By Race-ethnicity
- Type of plan (Private plan-Employment based, Direct purchase; Government plan-Medicare, Medicaid)
- Median Annual Income
- Employment Status
- Education level
- Number of health plans (One or Multiple coverage types)
- Nativity (Native born citizen, Non-citizen, Naturalized citizen)
With addition of these filters, more insights will be revealed. For example, the employment rate in every state reveals what percent of people are insured under Private plan. Working-age adults are the most likely to be covered by private health insurance, which provided coverage to 71.1 percent of the population aged 19 to 64 years. And they might have lowest rate of coverage through the government.
On the other hand poor people or unemployed do not wish to be insured because of limited resources. Millions of Americans qualified for Affordable Care Act, but for whatever combination of reasons didn’t make use of the act.
Redesign
If I were to redesign I would also include bar graphs along with world map which will then depict more information on the above mentioned pointers.
https://drive.google.com/a/scu.edu/file/d/0B08_JvsnmpGTZXFJNDBKdWtvZzQ/view?usp=sharing
These bar graphs could be made interactive with the world map to see the trend across different states in United States.
Conclusion
Existing visualization needs to imbibe more details. By adding above mentioned filters, it is easier to find out which state and which set of people need to be focused on. In order to keep the premiums affordable for everyone else it is necessary the young people who are generally healthier and cheaper to insure should sign up for coverage. Hence, it becomes essential to know the age category that needs to be focused. Insurance providers would be then able to target right set of people to get them insured.
References:
https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/health_insurance/
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-253.pdf
http://www.healthline.com/health-news/why-some-people-dont-buy-health-insurance-071315#4