From Kaiser Health Foundation:
A total of 16.4 million non-elderly adults have gained health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act became law five years ago this month – a “historic” reduction in the number of uninsured, the Department of Health and Human Services said Monday.
Those gaining insurance since 2010 include 2.3 million young adults aged 18 to 26 who were able to remain on their parents’ health insurance plus another 14.1 million adults who obtained coverage through expansions of the Medicaid program, new marketplace coverage and other sources, according to HHS’ report .
From New York Times:
Since the first open enrollment period began in October 2013, the officials said, the proportion of adults lacking insurance has dropped to 13.2 percent, from 20.3 percent.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said the data revealed “the largest reduction in the uninsured in four decades.” Many people gained coverage after the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
It’s almost like the free market likes giving the back hand to people who need insurance and that the only way to expand access is through government programs.
Double plus ungood thought crimes.
JCJ
Kill the bill!
Jerzy Russian
How can this be? I thought their web site did not work.
C.V. Danes
Extend Medicare to all to cover basic service and ER visits, and allow it to compete with the insurance providers in the open market for all else.
Roger Moore
Obviously they’re cooking the books, probably because Obama is threatening their children.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: OMG, that’s it!
To Serve ManThe ACA is a cookbook!Rommie
Whew – you said Everybody, not Everyone, so I can relax. Had me worried some disaster was incoming…
sharl
OT:
Of possible interest to one of the commenters here (who’s probably already seen it) – Spain finds Don Quixote writer Cervantes’ tomb in Madrid
Just Some Fuckhead
Why won’t the free market allow me to comparison shop for a new liver?
Mike in NC
Cramming healthcare down their throats! Where is our savior Ted Cruz?
Linnaeus
Well, as I was told by someone on Facebook, “a health insurance card paid for by others does not guarantee access.”
Brachiator
There is still much to do here. Millions have gained health insurance coverage, but sometimes getting an actual doctor is a hurdle.
Obviously, though, the benefits are real for many people. It will be interesting to see how the Republicans continue to frame their feverish desire to kill the Affordable Care Act, aided ironically by “single payer or nothing” liberals.
steve
So 2 questions:
1. What would the percentage of adults uninsured be if the Medicaid expansion went through everywhere?
2. How many of the remaining uninsured adults are undocumented?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Brachiator:
It would be awfully nice if we could actually extend and improve PPACA rather than having to constantly defend the small piece of ground it currently holds. Maybe address some of those annoying things like hospitals magically sending every “out of network” doctor and lab technician at the hospital to one’s room so they can charge you full price for it. Crazy talk, I know. :-)
Brachiator
@steve:
I don’t know the answer to this. However, the current health care law in most instances explicitly prohibits people who are not legal residents from getting health insurance from a Marketplace provider.
Iowa Old Lady
We were out to dinner the other night with, among others, a guy who kept complaining that the ACA made him pay for others’ health insurance. His wife had been volunteering as a tax preparer and had been wrestling with whether people owed back some of the subsidy they got on the exchanges because they misestimated their income. Apparently, that requires some complex work.
My understanding was the ACA was fully paid for by taxes on the wealthy and on things like medical devices, plus what people pay themselves, which I thought was supposed to be limited to something like 9% of their income (a pretty big chunk, IMHO). Is that wrong?
the Conster
@Iowa Old Lady:
I fucking hate that guy.
Brachiator
@Iowa Old Lady:
No. The Health Care Marketplace provides for subsidies for health care insurance based on state demographics, federal poverty level computations and a couple of other factors. People who apply for health care insurance through the marketplace are supposed to estimate their household income. Some people come close. Some people deliberately understate their income to get coverage.
When you file your tax return, and you got insurance through the Marketplace, you have to reconcile your estimated income with your actual income.
The ACA is paid for by some new taxes, by people who choose not to get insurance and who have to pay a penalty, and by the insurance payments of the new people who are getting coverage. There are a few other adjustments and fees as well. Whether this will pay for the entire program is an interesting guess.
Linda Featheringill
@sharl:
Cervantez: Cool!
patrick II
@Brachiator:
There are nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Before ACA I read there were about 47 million people uninsured. If that is correct, about 25 % of the uninusured were undocumented. 47 million minus the 12 million undocumented leaves 35 million legal ACA customers. Of those 16.4 million now have insurance, leaving 18.6 million to go. I am not sure how many of those 18.6 would be covered if they weren’t living in states governed by sociopaths. Also, in some of the same states, the drive for eligibles to get insured through ACA was actively undercut by their state government. So, without republican sociopathology, ACA would be a pretty good first step to getting close to universal health care.
All numbers are pretty rough, but I think approximately correct.
I personally have no trouble letting undocumented workers buy insurance through ACA. We could argue about subsidies later.
richard mayhew
@steve: The best guesstimate is that 4 million people would be eligible for Medicaid expansion if they lived in non-sadist states, so back of the envolope, another 2% of the adult 18-64 population.
Brachiator
@Iowa Old Lady:
By the way, the issue of correctly calculating any available subsidy was complicated by the fact that approximately 800,000 people received forms from the Marketplace with incorrect amounts related to their insurance coverage. This full first year of the ACA has been very challenging.
MomSense
@Iowa Old Lady:
The thing is that we have always been paying for other people’s health care, we just didn’t get a good return on our money. Providers raise the cost of services to make up for all the uninsured people who receive treatment but cannot pay their bill.
MomSense
@Brachiator:
I got a letter from the marketplace saying that my statement was incorrect and that I need to wait to file my taxes.
Iowa Old Lady
@the Conster: You and me both.
@Brachiator: Yeah, I suspected this law was long because it was worked out in such detail, in contrast to the Rs’ “plan.”
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Iowa Old Lady:
I think that guy doesn’t understand how insurance works. It’s not a savings plan where you send in your deposit every month and you draw from your personal pot of money if you need care. The whole group sends in their payment and then then it’s used to pay for anyone in the group. Is he pissed off because his auto insurance is paying for other people’s accident claims? His homeowner’s insurance is not reserved for himself alone but is used for the claims of other customers?
Iowa Old Lady
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): No, he thinks his income tax dollars are being used for the subsidies.
Brachiator
@patrick II:
This is never going to happen as long as the Republicans control Congress. In addition, there are some “Dream Act” illegal immigrants who originally were going to be allowed to buy coverage, but this was proposed regulation was scuttled.
And when the GOP gets tired of adding abortion restrictions to new bills, I expect to see them start adding health care related riders.
It is going to be a tough and nasty ride toward the 2016 elections.
Brachiator
@MomSense:
Sorry to hear that you were affected by this. Yes, you should wait to file your federal return. If you filed with incorrect information, your return might be delayed when it was processed. With luck, you will receive the corrected Marketplace statement soon.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Iowa Old Lady:
Yep, he’s a dumbass. The whole point of PPACA being revenue neutral is that it doesn’t require any additional taxes. If he’s pissed off that a single dollar of his taxes goes to a program he doesn’t support, I’ll be happy to tell him about the trillions of tax dollars that were wasted for a war I didn’t support. When he pays me back my tax dollars for that, we can talk about the $5 per year (guesstimated) of his taxes going to PPACA subsidies.
am
Those numbers are like a greensnake in a sugar cane field!
Tom
I have no idea how we get to single payer but my wife has Medicare and we both love it.
So, I was thinking:
Lower the Medicare age to 55.
Let people buy into Medicare from age 26 (when they go off their parents’ insurance)
Would this be the fabled ‘public option’?
The Dude
Are the figures adjusted for the grandparents who got snuffed out by Obama’s death panels?
Tommy
@Tom: My father worked for the federal government for 30+ years. He and my mom get their health care through said government. Mom was in the ICU for more than a month last year. I asked them what they had to pay and he said not a single penny. Everything was covered. I recall thinking that is cool, why can’t we all have that?
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
This is not really the case. The ACA aims to be revenue neutral in that new taxes offset new subsidies and credits. But there are a boatload of new taxes to pay for this thing, including the .9 percent additional Medicare Tax and the 3.8 percent tax on investment income. These taxes mainly hit people earning more than $200,000.
Then there is the Shared Responsibility payment that must be coughed up by those who choose not to have health care coverage. This tax (yep, the Supreme Court agreed that this “fee” is really a “tax,” and legal) is relatively modest for 2014, but may be a substantial bite in 2015 and later years. This will hit young single people and middle income taxpayers harder, and might cause a revolt by otherwise reasonable people who currently are OK with the idea of expanded health care coverage.
There are more taxes and fees involved, but this may be enough for now.
aimai
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Very few people have the slightest idea how the insurance they pay actually works. I had the same damned conversation with lots of people over and over and over again during the run up to the ACA.
Davis X. Machina
@JCJ: Amen. 16.4 million speed-bumps on the road to single payer.
Every night I look up at the dead uncaring stars and howl “How long must we wait till the health insurance industry is destroyed?”
Cacti
None of that matters because public option.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Brachiator:
Right, but I think you’re making an unwarranted assumption that the guy IOL was talking to has a principled objection to a specific funding source for PPACA that can be overcome with logic, reason and facts. It’s more that Rush and Glenn Beck told him subsidies are going to young bucks buying T-bones and Cadillacs with his hard-earned tax dollars and he believes them. To people like him, explaining how PPACA is funded is seen as you trying to con him out of his money by bullshitting him with a lot of fancy numbers you just made up.
boatboy_srq
@Iowa Old Lady: @Brachiator: IOW, he would be paying for other people’s health insurance only if he elected not to get insurance himself.
shelley
But Tom Cruz said Obamacare is a disaster, you know, in that speech where he scared that little girl.
Gin & Tonic
@Davis X. Machina: What do you do when it’s cloudy?
Ben Cisco
@shelley: And like any true sociopath/’Real Murkan, Cindy Lou Who’s mom swears it ain’t so.
Amir Khalid
@shelley:
I know you meant to say Ted Cruz. Speaking of whom, he may have found his true calling: frightening small children with nonsensical stories.
Davis X. Machina
@Gin & Tonic: Howl inside. It amused the cats.
kindness
@Mike in NC:
Out scaring little children like it was Halloween. The truth turned on it’s head as I suspect Ted Cruz masks will become popular for Halloween (and bank robberies, assaults, college fraternity parties….)
WaterGirl
Richard, how about asking BJ folks like MomSense and about a million others to write a blog post about what ACA has done for them – and send it to you via email – and you can schedule one thread a day with content from our own.
We can help change the narrative about the ACA in our own way, one thread at a time. And we get one more BJ thread a day during a time that they seem in short supply!
Will you consider it? :-)
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: I saw that clip on one of the nightly shows. The audience was laughing about that cute little girl asking if her world is on fire.
Isn’t that cute ?!?!?!?!!!
cmorenc
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
He’s pissed because his effective premiums for any given level of coverage are based on his income (because that determines whether a person is entitled to subsidies, and he’s not), and to his way of thinking he’s being both actually and effectively taxed on money he earns to subsidize people earning less who didn’t earn that money. Fuckin’ moochers on his hard work!
That’s the way most of these people think and viscerally feel, although often overlaid on this true primal motivation is some tough-love conservative ideology about how such forced income transfers from
producersentrepreneurs tomoocherswelfare recipients is actually harmful to the latter, by stifling the very economic activity that will give them the opportunity to lift themselves to prosperity, by their own bootstraps. Tax cuts create wealth, welfare destroys it. And nothing, not even a diamond blade, will cut through that bullshit with such people – unless perhaps a close family member who would otherwise have been up shit creek is the one benefiting from the safety net provided by the ACA (or medicare).Brachiator
@shelley:
Hah! In this case, Tom Cruz would be just as scary as Senator Ted Cruz.
Tommy
@WaterGirl: Great idea.
I work for myself. I get a plan through the ACA that is more than $100 less per month and better than what I had before. I am 45 and blessed with amazing health. Not been to a doctor in like 12 years. But I know if I get sick I am covered. That is so important to me and I think often not understood by the MSM.
RaflW
Clearly the ACA is working in Minnesota, because the GOP wants to kill it, in two steps, between now and 2017. Step one – roll all our already-insured folks on an existing state program over to ACA policies, a move that one insurance executive said would raise costs for poor people “a couple of hundred dollars at least in differences in premium through the year, and deductible differences.”
Then, by 2017, after destabilizing MNSure and running up costs for low income folks, the same legislator wants to force MNSure to shut down to be replaced by … wait for it … a Federal Exchange!
Huh, Mr. Dean, do you mean you want to force everyone onto an exchange that could quite possibly be defunded by the SCOTUS? Really, do tell? The same Federal Exchange that your buddies in D.C. have voted to end some 50+ times? How fascinating!
Now, we have a sane Democratic governor, so his bills are useless exercises, but they take up valuable legislating time and plenty of press oxygen, so they are not useless in the policy wars. It’s just so f’ing transparent that he’s got a one-two punch lined up to screw over poors first, and then lots of moderate income and middle class people 2 years hence.
I’ll call it what it is: evil.
RaflW
@Iowa Old Lady:
What the heck does this guy think insurance is? I’ve paid in to homeowner’s insurance for 26 years now. I’m thankful to say that I haven’t had to make a claim in that time. I have enough brain cells to have figured out that part of what I’m paying in is paying other people’s claims. Duh. It’s the whole friggin’ point.
I just despair sometimes about the total ignorance of so many consumer-Americans. Consumers who haven’t got a clue how, even in broad strokes, our economy works. And that ignorance is intentional: much easier to soak the rubes if they’re, well, rubes!
Randy P
Any experience here with the ACA and filing taxes? My wife in her usual package from her accountant got a letter asking her to specify how she’s insured, because if it’s through a health exchange then there are some huge number of extra forms to file (presumably severely increasing his charges). I have never heard anything along those lines from anyone. You would think if that was true, the Fox talking heads would have been mentioning it 24/7.
Yet we’ve had no indication that this guy is a wingnut, or any indication of his politics at all. This was completely out of the blue.
Does anyone else have a similar story to tell?
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Every now and then, you get to sit in the catbird seat. Part of my job is to teach CPAs and tax preparers about the health care act, and also to provides note to my bosses that are part of a weekly conversation with the IRS about this stuff and related matters.
So, yeah, I could bullshit lay people with numbers that I make up, just for the fun of it. But it’s more fun to actually know what I’m talking about.
Brachiator
@Randy P:
It is largely true, but the facts are too complicated for Fox News.
People who get insurance through the Marketplace, or exchange, will have to fill out new Form 8962. For most taxpayers, this will not be a huge deal. However, there can be some situations (divorced couples, couples who got married in 2014) where the forms could be fairly complicated. Now, on top of all this, the IRS released the new forms and the instructions late, and still have yet to produce some important instructions related to all this.
On top of all this even more, some forms sent out by the Health Care Exchanges showing premium coverage were wrong and have to be re-issued.
This has led to extra work for tax preparers and software companies. And so, yeah, some CPAs have raised their fees. A few even have sent engagement letters where they politely note that they will not prepare a return for customers who do not provide new necessary information about health care coverage.
A reasonable increase in fees is not out of place. Be happy if your tax guy has taken the time to learn this stuff well.
Iowa Old Lady
@boatboy_srq: It’s even worse than that. He’s retired and on Medicare. He still consults part time and is pissed at the taxes he has to pay on that extra income.
C.V. Danes
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Or allow the poors to sell theirs on the open market.
C.V. Danes
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Repubs have been attacking Social Security since its inception, so I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.
C.V. Danes
@Iowa Old Lady:
How about all the people he’s been paying for as a member of his current insurance plan, or who will be paying for him if he ever gets sick.
boatboy_srq
@WaterGirl: One more proof that child abuse is not a concept easily understood by Teahadis.
C.V. Danes
@Tom: It’d be a good start.
boatboy_srq
@Iowa Old Lady:
Nevermind.
C.V. Danes
@Tommy:
Because Republicans would rather work to nullify your parent’s plan and force them to endure the hell that the rest of us have to endure than the other way around.
workworkwork
@Tommy: I’m self-employed as well and have a pre-existing condition (type 2 diabetes). Before the ACA kicked in, I couldn’t get insurance at ANY price. I had COBRA but that’s temporary.
Now I have a plan that’s $200/mo. less than COBRA.
workworkwork
@Randy P: I just saw our tax guy and all I had to do was report how much I paid for premiums during 2014. We don’t get a subsidy so maybe that’s the difference.
boatboy_srq
@C.V. Danes: Ayuh. It’s never about making a reasonable benefit available to everyone because it’s the Right Thing To Do; it’s always about taking away Lucky Duckies’ Special Privileged Entitlements Because They Have It Good And You Don’t. Resentment plays well with the GOTea.
D.N. Nation
@C.V. Danes: This is literally what Tom Sowell has argued for.
JGabriel
NYT via Richard Mayhew @ Top:
So, now what do we have to do to knock it down from 13.2% to 3.2%?
stinger
@MomSense: This.
Felanius Kootea
@JGabriel:
Vote the Republicans out of power throughout the South. I figure it’ll take about 25 years.
Piquoiseau
Um, so according to these numbers, the adult children on their parents’ plan and the newly eligible Medicaid enrollees account for all 16.4 people who have gained insurance. So 0 people gained insurance through guaranteed issue and community rating on the exchanges? That seems like it couldn’t be right.
Zinsky
This isn’t possible because the Kenyan Muslim who has no birth certificate and stole the presidency with “Obamaphones” is cooking the books, along with the unemployment rate, which is really 112%. Also, this proves we must slash every government program except Defense, which must receive wheelbarrows full of cash every day so that we can invade and occupy every Islamic country on the planet and kill their children. I know because I learned this on FoxNews and it is also in the Bible that we must all have guns locked and loaded at all times because of the 10th Amendment and Baby Jesus told us so too. Amen, praise the Lord and God Bless Murica!