“States that have adopted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion had lower uninsured rates in 2015 among non-elderly adults than other states”, reported Matt Broaddus and Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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2013 was the year before the government health-insurance exchanges opened under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare).
“We see much larger drops in the uninsured rates, particularly between low and moderate income people” in states that expanded Medicaid, said Sara R. Collins, a vice president at the Commonwealth Fund. “Today in MA 97% of our people have health insurance and the Affordable Care Act has led to the federal government providing our state with hundreds of millions in new funding for health care costs that had previously been paid for with state revenues”.
Medicare expansion states have lower rates of uninsurance and bigger drops in uninsurance since Obamacare started up. Not all the uninsured in each state would qualify for insurance, but a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, based on last year’s data, found that 19 percent of the population of those states that haven’t expanded Medicaid – close to 3 million people – fell in the coverage gap and would be eligible if Medicaid were expanded.
“Unfortunately when Congress and Washington make a mistake, it’s the American people that have to pay the price, and it seems like the consequences of Obamacare are only getting worse”, said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) in a floor speech Tuesday. The Obama administration has been adamant the large premium increases in 2017 are a one-time phenomenon.
“While those stories of insurer pullouts made a lot of news, they may not have affected that many people”. “People haven’t lost coverage because of those announcements”.
The report said that the decrease in uninsured rates was driven by both private insurance gains – where the rate in private coverage gained 1.2 percentage points – and by an expansion of government coverage.
The Bay State saw a roughly 0.9 percent dip in the number of uninsured individuals between 2013 and 2015.
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“In 2015, private health insurance continued to be more prevalent than public coverage, at 67.2 percent and 37.1 percent, respectively”, said the report.
