State Plates
The Pennsylvania Health Plate
In Pennsylvania, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black Pennsylvania in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, and Pennsylvania's distribution figures — 1.66 million Black residents, 11 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 Pennsylvania, 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. Not to rank Pennsylvania but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
For Pennsylvania, 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 Pennsylvania, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.
In Pennsylvania, 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. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Pennsylvania's households stand.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Pennsylvania; the benchmark rows are the published national health record, labeled as benchmarks. In Pennsylvania, 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 Pennsylvania, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Pennsylvania holds about 1.66 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in eight of its people, with Black alone at about 1.42 million, or 11 percent. The table is where the general pattern becomes Pennsylvania's own figures.
For Pennsylvania, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. Cheyney University, founded in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth, is the oldest historically Black institution in the United States; Lincoln University, founded in 1854, was the first degree-granting HBCU and educated a generation of African and Caribbean independence-era leaders alongside its American alumni. The plate sets the national ladder beside Pennsylvania's attainment and invites the two-sided reading.
In Pennsylvania, 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 Pennsylvania that population numbers 1.66 million. In Pennsylvania, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
Filed in this series as The Pennsylvania Health Plate, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 11%; Black share, alone or in combination: 12.8%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.66 Million. In Pennsylvania, the atlas asks no more of the material than the material can state.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Pennsylvania: Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.66 Million; United States benchmark — Black Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately: 1 in 10. The measures above and these together fix the population of Pennsylvania 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 11% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 12.8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.66 Million |
| 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.