“By tracking the insurance status of these individuals over a period of four years, it is clear that the majority of individuals who get health insurance coverage keep some form of coverage”.
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“We were trying to shed light on the first few years of the ACA”, Dijulio said of The California Endowment-funded survey.
Before the Affordable Care Act, there were seven million uninsured people living in California.
The survey found that the largest group of Californians without insurance are immigrants in the country illegally, who make up about a third of the uninsured.
KFF researchers first surveyed a representative sample of 2,001 uninsured Californian adults under the age of 65 in the summer of 2013, prior to the ACA’s first open enrollment period.
California is one of the states that has gone the farthest in embracing ObamaCare. But even those who would qualify for Medicaid or plan subsidies are concerned they wouldn’t be able to afford marketplace coverage, with 64% of uninsured adults surveyed by the Commonwealth Fund saying they hadn’t shopped for coverage because they didn’t expect to be able to afford it. In 2015, the survey found that 68 percent of the previously uninsured had obtained such coverage.
Miranda Dietz, researcher at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center and co-author of the study, says affordability and eligibility are the main concerns of uninsured people. It has expanded Medicaid under the law and has taken an engaged approach to running its state marketplace. While 36 percent said they had tried to buy coverage, 63 percent reported that they had not. Hispanics also make up a significant portion of the groups that were likely to lack coverage, according to the report. Almost 80 percent of the recently insured said their experiences with their current coverage has been positive. “However, millions of people still don’t have health insurance”. In early 2016, 41% of the uninsured were white, and 12% were black, but 40% were Latino, with 6% of other groups uninsured.
A report out Thursday from the Commonwealth Fund says that young Latinos are among the most likely to remain uninsured despite the Affordable Care Act. By 2016, the uninsured rate among that population had fallen just to 35 percent this year – which is actually 1 percent more than in the past two years.
One of the biggest factors that made a difference in uninsured rates among both Latino and black individuals has been expanded Medicaid eligibility.
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The report found that nearly two-thirds of uninsured adults who knew about Obamacare insurance marketplaces, which offer subsidized coverage to low- and middle-income people, had not visited those exchanges “because they did not think they would be able to afford coverage”.
