State Plates
The Nebraska Health Plate
In Nebraska, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black Nebraska in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, and Nebraska's distribution figures — 140,000 Black residents, 5 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 Nebraska, 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 benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Nebraska stands so the plate can be read.
For Nebraska, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. 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 Nebraska, 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 Nebraska, 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 Nebraska 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 Nebraska; the benchmark rows are the published national health record, labeled as benchmarks. In Nebraska, 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 Nebraska, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Nebraska holds about 140,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in fourteen of its people, with Black alone at about 96,000, or 4.9 percent. Nearly two-thirds live in Omaha, and within Omaha, the community's historic center — North Omaha — is one of the most storied Black districts of the plains: a railroad and meatpacking community that produced Malcolm X (born in Omaha in 1925) and a jazz scene of regional fame. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Nebraska's particular numbers.
The coverage figures take their local form in Nebraska, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. Here, on the plate for Nebraska, nebraska's Black indicators present the plains pattern with one sharp internal divide: the state's overall Black medians (income, attainment through the university system, homeownership in the smaller cities) sit mid-pack for the region, while North Omaha's tracts record concentrated indicators at the difficult end of any table in this reference — the metro's intra-city spread is the state's defining data fact. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating Nebraska, never by ranking it.
In Nebraska, 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 Nebraska that population numbers 140,000. In Nebraska, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
For The Nebraska 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): 5%; Black share, alone or in combination: 7.2%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 140,000. In Nebraska, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 5% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 7.2% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 140,000 |
| 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.