State Plates
The Montana Health Plate
In Montana, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black Montana in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, and Montana's distribution figures — 13,000 Black residents, 1 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Montana, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. 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 Montana, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.
The coverage figures take their local form in Montana, 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. Not to rank Montana but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
In Montana, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Held against the national midpoint, Montana's own rows say how its households stand.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Montana; the benchmark rows are the published national health record, labeled as benchmarks. In Montana, 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 Montana, 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 25th Infantry — a Black regiment — garrisoned Fort Missoula from 1888, and from there its soldiers conducted the Army's celebrated bicycle experiments: in 1896 and 1897 the 'Bicycle Corps' rode from Missoula to Yellowstone and then to St. Louis, 1,900 miles in 41 days, testing bicycles as military transport and generating national press — the riders' photographs are among the iconic images of the Black regulars. In Montana, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
For Montana, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. Here, on the plate for Montana, no Montana city holds a Black population large enough to form a census-visible community in the mainland sense. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national ladder, and the attainment recorded in Montana.
This plate takes up its subject directly: The Montana Health Plate. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 1%; Black share, alone or in combination: 1.2%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 13,000. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for Montana.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Montana: Black residents, alone or in combination: 13,000; United States benchmark — Black Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately: 1 in 10. The measures above and these together fix the population of Montana as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
Filed in this series as The Montana Health Plate, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 1%; Black share, alone or in combination: 1.2%. Here, on the plate for Montana, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 1.2% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 13,000 |
| 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.