CDC Reports On Decrease In Uninsured Under Affordable Care Act

The CDC reports the percent of uninsured showed the largest drop since they began reporting data on this, consistent with other measures of the decrease in uninsured under the Affordable Care Act such as the Gallup poll.

The share of working-age people without health insurance fell by more than 4 percentage points in 2014, the biggest drop since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began reporting the data in 1997.

Last year, 16.3 percent of adults under age 65, or about 31.7 million people, lacked medical coverage, according to a CDC survey published Tuesday. That’s down from 20.4 percent a year earlier.

Many people are able to receive coverage due to eliminating the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage based upon pre-existing conditions. Many also are assisted by the subsidies which help them pay for the insurance premiums under Obamacare.

We are now waiting to see how the Supreme Court rules on King v. Burwell. Even if the Supreme Court accepts this fallacious argument that the law only intended to provide subsidies for those purchasing insurance on the state exchanges, and not the federal exchange, I would expect some sort of fix to enable the subsides to continue. The Republican Congress would be under tremendous pressure to cooperate in making a slight revision to the Affordable Care Act to continue the subsidies. If they did not, I bet some way would be found to make versions of the federal exchange available to the states.

Of course we cannot underestimate the possibility of Republicans to deny health care coverage, as we saw with the expanded Medicaid program:

States that expanded Medicaid through Obamacare provisions had lowers rates of uninsured, the CDC said. In states that didn’t expand Medicaid, 19.3 percent of adults under 65 were uninsured, compared with 13.3 percent in states that did.

Most people 65 and over get coverage through Medicare, the U.S. government program to cover the elderly.

Texas and Oklahoma had the highest rate of uninsured at 21.5 percent; neither state expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Hawaii had the lowest rate, with 2.5 percent uninsured last year.

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