HIV Death Rates, Insurance Coverage, and Queer Population Trends
HIV Deaths as a Function of Insurance Coverage
About the graph
The graph shows the relationship between national health insurance coverage and HIV death rates. The points are further analyzed by overall HIV prevalence and percent LGBTQ+ population. Overall, there is no strong correlation between insurance coverage and HIV death rates or HIV prevalence. This indicates that insurance rates are not a good predictor of HIV deaths or prevalence, and there are other underlying factors contributing to disparities seen in HIV trends. The graph also notes two important outliers in the data. First, Texas has a very low percentage of insured citizens compared to other states (about 83.4%). Secondly, Washington D.C. has the highest HIV death rates (39.3 per 100,000) and overall prevalence (about 2,355 per 100,000), while also having the highest adult LGBTQ+ population (14.3%) and highest insurance coverage rates at 97.1% of the population having health insurance. These extreme values are impacting the overall data, and even contributing to a regression line with a slightly positive slope, suggesting that HIV deaths increase as more of the population has health insurance. This is not intuitive given research on how a lack of healthcare access has a negative impact on health outcomes. In order to evaluate the data more effectively, the two outlier states have been removed and a new scatterplot and regression line is created.
HIV Deaths as a Function of Insurance Coverage (Outliers Removed)
About the graph
With outliers now removed, we see that the regression line has a slightly negative slope, suggesting an increase in HIV death rates are associated with lower rates of health insurance coverage. This trend falls more in line with existing literature on the relationship between health insurance and health outcomes. Although, the regression model created was not statistically significant, so there are still other factors besides general health insurance coverage that predict HIV prevalence and death rates. From this adjusted graph we can also see that states with larger LGBTQ+ populations tend to have higher HIV prevalence rates. This indicates that the queer community is still disproportionately effected by HIV transmission rates.
Data Citation
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2024. “HIV data.” https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/nchhstpatlas/tables.html (accessed February 7, 2025).
United States Census Bureau. 2022. “U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey.” https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2022.S2701?t=Health&g=010XX00US$0400000 (accessed February 28, 2025).
UCLA School of Law: Williams Institute. 2023. “Adult LGBT Population in the United States.” https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/LGBT-Adult-US-Pop-Dec-2023.pdf (accessed March 1, 2025).