If you’re like me, you’re watching the both sides of the Congressional healthcare debates sling statistics, money, and tweets at one another. So I found last month’s mapped visualization by Axios to be mesmerizing in the way that it did one thing very well: show how the rate of uninsured Americans shifted under Obamacare/the Affordable Care Act. It doesn’t discuss issues of federal costs, personal expenses, or caliber of coverage, but it does a great job of showing one shifting variable over time: percentage of people with some sort of health insurance versus those with none at all.
The screengrab below shows a static image, but click through to the Axios site so you can see the interactive GIF and see the colors change across time.
Then ask yourself some data viz questions:
- Axios’ graphic measures by county. How might this look different if it measured by state?
- How does the color palette influence how you feel about the data? Would more emotional colors like blood-red impact your interpretation?
- Can you track back to the original data source (a division of the U.S. Census) and try out these questions?