Guest opinion: Rural Wisconsin workers lose health insurance twice as fast as before the pandemic

Guest opinion: Rural Wisconsin workers lose health insurance twice as fast as before the pandemic

Reading Time: 3 minutes Wisconsin’s unemployment rate sits near a historic low, but for thousands of rural residents the link between a layoff and losing health insurance has never been stronger. Using county-level data from all 72 Wisconsin counties between 2014 and 2023, I tracked how shifts in local unemployment moved together with shifts in the uninsured rate. Before the pandemic, a one percentage point rise in county unemployment was tied t…