More than two-thirds of Californians uninsured before the Affordable Care Act now have coverage, a new report finds.
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Latest survey commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a non-profit organization that focuses on health care issues in the United States, researchers found that out of the 2,100 uninsured Californians they observed before the expansion of health care under Obamacare in 2014, there are now only 32 percent of them still uninsured.
But the survey released Thursday by the Menlo Park-based group also found that plenty of challenges for the newly insured remain when it comes to paying for and accessing care. But well into the second year of expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act, those worries have eased significantly in the nation’s most populous state.
The largest share of the newly insured – 34 percent – are covered in the Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid. But 29 percent of the remaining uninsured are Hispanics who are eligible for Medi-Cal or exchange-sold plans, Kaiser found.
The survey results didn’t surprise some consumer health advocates. Only 49 percent of the recently insured reported difficulty affording health care in the most recent study, as compared to 86 percent in 2013.
“For me, it was really the size of the gains in people’s sense of financial security and in their health care”, said Mollyann Brodie, director of public opinion and survey research at the foundation. Access to Medi-Cal doctors is also a big problem and it exacerbated with the expanded number of Medi-Cal enrollees.
The report found that since late 2013, the overall percentage of people without health insurance in Texas has fallen from 24.6 percent to 16.9 percent-or a decrease of nearly one-third. And 12 percent said they had gotten coverage though Covered California, the state-run Obamacare insurance marketplace, which has more than 1 million customers in plans sold by private insurers, according to the study.
Elena Marks, president and CEO of the Episcopal Health Foundation, said the fact that low-income and poor people make up a big majority of the uninsured is not surprising, “because most of them were ineligible for coverage opportunities in the marketplace”. Sixteen percent of these people claim that they were told by the doctors that they would not be accepted as patients in the past year, while 23 percent said that they were made to wait longer for a medical appointment than what was acceptable.
In San Jose, 48-year-old Dawn Hendricks – who had gone without health insurance since 2010 – this year enrolled in a Valley Health Plan offered on the Covered California exchange after she became a caregiver for her 63-year-old husband, who is disabled. Her premiums are just $25 per month.
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Over 50 percent of those previously uninsured people believe that having health coverage allows them to feel more secured financially. About 26 percent of the remaining uninsured are likely eligible for Medi-Cal, and another 25 percent are likely eligible for subsidized plans under Covered California. From February 18 to May 13, 2015, 1,105 adults who had participated in the first survey were contacted. The percentage of such low-income people who lack insurance in Texas actually increased by almost 4 percentage points since Obamacare was implemented.
