Rural Minnesota looks good on insurance map

The online news organization Daily Yonder is a great way to keep tabs on all issues rural in America, and one thing it does particularly well is portray data at the county level.

The Daily Yonder's national maps are often a quick way to see how rural Minnesota fits into the grand scheme on a variety of topics, and this week's striking example shows health insurance rates. In particular, it shows how much more insured rural Minnesotans are than people in the rest of the country.

Almost all Minnesota counties are under 12 percent uninsured. Compare that to the pink and red of Texas, Montana and Georgia, for example.

Minnesota as a whole always comes out near the best when it comes to health insurance. The latest statewide information from the Minnesota Department of Health indicated 9.1 percent of residents don't have insurance. That's on the low end nationally but higher than it used to be.

The Daily Yonder map makes you realize that geography might not be the best way to drill into the statewide numbers. As the health department said in a release last spring, breaking out groups by race and ethnicity shows where bigger differences lie.

Twenty six percent of Hispanics don't have health insurance, the state says.

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