State Plates
The Maine Health Plate
In Maine, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black Maine in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, and Maine's distribution figures — 45,000 Black residents, 2 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
In Maine, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. In Maine, held against the national pattern, the state's own rows say how its coverage stands.
The coverage figures take their local form in Maine, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. 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. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Maine stands so the plate can be read.
The coverage figures take their local form in Maine, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. 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. Not to rank Maine but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Maine; the benchmark rows are the published national health record, labeled as benchmarks. In Maine, 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 Maine, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. The composition makes Maine's Black population the most immigrant-origin in this reference outside the gateway metros: a majority of Black Mainers are African-born or the children of African-born parents in the survey estimates, with the Somali community the largest single group. Against the national ladder, the rows below place Maine's attainment.
In Maine, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Here, on the plate for Maine, the institutions have followed the people: Portland's and Lewiston's African community organizations, mosques serving the Somali communities (among the first established in northern New England), the African grocery and services economies of Lisbon Street and Congress Street, and the state university system's growing African student presence form a civic layer that did not exist a generation ago — the fastest institutional build-out, relative to population, of any profile in this section. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Maine.
In Maine, 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 Maine that population numbers 45,000. In Maine, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Maine Health Plate — because the published record supports one. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 2%; Black share, alone or in combination: 3.3%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 45,000. In Maine, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
The record behind this plate of Maine is published, not estimated by this atlas: 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). Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Maine, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 3.3% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 45,000 |
| 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.