State Plates
The Colorado Health Plate
In Colorado, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black Colorado in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, and Colorado's distribution figures — 285,000 Black residents, 4 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
The coverage figures take their local form in Colorado, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. About one in ten Black Americans — roughly 9 to 10 percent in the Census Bureau's annual coverage report — has no health insurance at all, a rate above the national figure and above the White rate. The point of the benchmark is position: where Colorado stands, stated before anything is made of it.
In Colorado, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Rates in this article are for the full population unless stated; nonelderly rates run higher than the all-ages figures because Medicare covers nearly everyone past 65 — one reason the Black uninsured problem is concentrated among working-age adults, as the age breakdown below shows. In Colorado, held against the national pattern, the state's own rows say how its coverage stands.
For Colorado, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. Employer-sponsored insurance is the largest single source, covering about half of Black Americans, through their own jobs or a family member's — a share below the White figure, reflecting the employment and occupational data of this reference: fewer Black workers in the large-firm, high-benefit sectors, more in service, temporary, and small-employer jobs where offers of coverage are thinner. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national midpoint, and the households of Colorado.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Colorado; the benchmark rows are the published national health record, labeled as benchmarks. In Colorado, health measures are survey-based, so the plate carries the survey sources on its face and treats the national pattern as the frame inside which state health agencies publish their own state-level readings.
The Population Behind the Plate
In Colorado, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Colorado holds about 285,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty of its people, with Black alone at about 231,000, or 4 percent. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Colorado.
In Colorado, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Colorado Springs, the corridor's southern anchor, holds the second community — some 45,000 to 55,000 Black residents in its metro — shaped by the military economy of Fort Carson and the Air Force installations at a share well above the state's. Boulder records a small, university-shaped Black population at roughly 1 to 2 percent of the city, among the smallest shares of any major college town in this reference; Fort Collins, Greeley, and Pueblo record small communities in the low single digits, Pueblo's with steel-era roots. Against the national ladder, the rows below place Colorado's attainment.
In Colorado, coverage is the gateway measure: it decides whether the rest of the health system is reachable at ordinary cost. The national Black coverage record, carried here as the benchmark, is the product of federal and state policy layered over the population this atlas counts — and in Colorado that population numbers 285,000. In Colorado, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
For The Colorado Health Plate, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 4%; Black share, alone or in combination: 5%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 285,000. In Colorado, what the sources publish, the plate reports; what they do not, it leaves alone.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 4% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 285,000 |
| United States benchmark — Black Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately | 1 in 10 |
| United States benchmark — Black Americans covered by Medicaid, approximately — and about one in three Black children | 1 in 5 |
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; U.S. Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (Current Population Survey). Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.