By ANNA MARIA BARRY-JESTER and BEN CASSELMAN
Nearly 9 million people gained insurance last year, a win for “Obamacare” as the president’s signature health care law expanded Medicaid and opened health insurance exchanges. And yet, 33 million Americans, 10.4 percent of the U.S. population, still went without health insurance for the entirety of 2014. Millions more were uninsured for at least part of the year.1 New data released this month shows they were disproportionately poor, black and Hispanic; 4.5 million of them were children.
It isn’t a surprise that some Americans still don’t have health insurance. Despite aiming to insure “everybody” in the U.S., the Affordable Care Act (ACA) left significant gaps in coverage, and decisions made by the law’s opponents have denied benefits to millions of people it was designed to help. But the new numbers reveal that most of the uninsured last year were people who should have been able to access insurance under the law. That presents a major challenge for President Obama in the final years of his term, but also an opportunity: Millions of Americans qualify for coverage but, for whatever combination of reasons, haven’t yet signed up.
The White House has said it will focus this year’s enrollment push on the remaining uninsured. So it’s worth taking a closer look at who those people were. Most of them — about 56 percent — fell into three major groups that were widely expected to have high uninsurance rates: immigrants, young adults and people in the so-called Medicaid gap. But that still left more than 14 million Americans who don’t have insurance and don’t fall into any of these categories.
...
3.8 million in the Medicaid gap
Set aside the 7 million noncitizen immigrants, most of whom were never meant to be covered by the ACA, and 26 million uninsured remain. Of those, nearly 4 million were meant to qualify for insurance under the federal law but were later blocked from coverage. They fell into what’s known as the “Medicaid gap,” with incomes that were too high for Medicaid eligibility and too low to receive subsidies on the new health care exchanges.4
When the Affordable Care Act was written, it expanded the existing Medicaid program to cover everyone living below the poverty line, including childless adults who had previously been mostly excluded from the program. It also offered subsidies to people earning 100 percent to 400 percent of the poverty line (but not less) to buy private insurance on the exchanges. A Supreme Court decision left Medicaid expansion up to individual states, and about half chose not to expand the program. That left millions of low-income people ineligible for Medicaid but, counterintuitively, unable to qualify for subsidies on the insurance marketplaces because they earned too little.
This 3.8 million was a very poor group overall, but nearly half, 1.7 million people, lived in families whose incomes were less than 50 percent of the poverty line. Because Medicaid historically tended to cover just families with children, the bulk of those falling into the gap were working-age adults without children; nonetheless, about 800,000 parents with children living at home fell into the gap.
But it wasn’t just poor people who were more likely to be uninsured in states that didn’t expand Medicaid.5 At every income level, people in non-expansion states were more likely to be uninsured:
Read rest at:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...lth-insurance/
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Someday I hope we will give up on GOP policies that just don't work.
What's funny is that the states that are actively hostile to the affordable care act are doing everything in their power to see it fail.
http://health.wusf.usf.edu/post/navi...-dept#stream/0
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...trict/2820327/
So when the GOP is in a position to advocate ignorance and keep people from learning about getting health insurance, they do so.
Not quite something to be proud of.. is it?
Naturally, it seems as though they're taking a Machiavellian approach to things.
I don't think they put that much thought into it. I think it is a mostly id-driven pathological hatred.
More crazy than clever, IMO.
Related, and I thought interesting to keep an eye on also:
Insurance Dropouts Present a Challenge for Health Law
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/12/us...ealth-law.html
yep, somthing as complex as ACA needs continuous fixing and improvement, but of course the Repugs want ACA, America, and Americans to fail.
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