The uninsured rate fell to 11.9 percent during the first quarter of this year, 1 percentage point below the rate at the close of 2014, according to the findings of a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index poll published Monday. The decline coincides with the start of benefits for new Obamacare enrollees at the beginning of 2015
And the Gallup graph:
Almost seems like this entire kludge is working very nicely. And we know that rate will tick down another notch as Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and now Montana continue to expand Medicaid to their entire eligible populations.
Baud
Roberts to the rescue!
D58826
It really is awful that facts have a liberal bias. Which of course makes it perfectly rational and understandable for true conservatives to live in a fact free and liberal free world.
Cervantes
Richard, I could look it up but (I hope) it’s quicker to ask you: in the graph, remind me, what’s that flat line observed last year?
(Thanks.)
dmsilev
@Cervantes: I’m not Richard, but to me it looks like normal statistical noise, i.e. scatter around an underlying trend. Look at that graph as being a slowly rising line between 2008 and late 2013, and then a steeply falling line since then, in both cases with about 0.5 percentage points of random noise added to each point.
rikyrah
THANKS for sharing the news.
Cervantes
@dmsilev:
Yes. To your eye (and again, I really should just look at the underlying Healthways numbers already), does it look as if the flat bit spans only one reporting period?
Malraux
The flat part could also partially be an effect from the open enrollment period. It looks like it bridges q2-q3. You wouldn’t expect as many people to gain insurance after the exchanges left open enrollment. That plus a bit of noise in the data.
Punchy
Methinks you’ll see the enantiomer of this graph come July 2015.
Tom
But, but! Job killer! Death panels! Argle bargle!
Another Holocene Human
Almost any big system that works is a kludge.
Roads? Kludge. Transit systems? Kludge. Most communities’ water and sewer lines? Big old kludge.
US military? Kludge kludge kludge.
But fire away, purity trolls. Your beautiful souls can’t bear the world in all its kludgey, utilitarian boxiness.
Cervantes
@Punchy:
In a hallucination? In a Republican campaign commercial? (But I repeat myself.)
@Malraux:
Yes, thanks. I wondered about that. Notice that it’s the only “horizontal” bit in the entire graph (at this resolution, anyway).
GregB
Yes but how many of these newly insured are communists, illegal immigrants and Al Qaeda sympathizers?
Oh there’s a report of an active shooter on a campus in NC.
Hopefully a custodian or the lunch lady are now packing heat under the new guns everywhere ALEC law and can get into a shootout.
Another Holocene Human
We are now consistently 33% below the uninsured rate of the “new normal” from the Great Recession.
Looking outside I see buildings being built furiously and a level of turnover and activity in commercial properties that seems to exceed bubble level in my town, I think because commercial was way fucking overpriced during the bubble. (And after the crash, I heard straight from the horse’s mouth that owners were giving leases away, zero rent was a possibility–not that anybody took it because nobody was making money at a store front at that time.) By commercial I mean commercial use, the commercial properties that rent residences primarily are going up at, hmm, a rational rate? Rent is kind of high so it makes sense to build more rentals. During the bubble a bunch of builders from Tampa descended on our town and way overbuilt rental units. This did not help renters because the fucking owners preferred to hold empty properties to cutting us a break on the rent. On the plus side, some properties were sold repeatedly as a series of would be owners lost their shirts. Insert Nelson: HA-HA!
ps: Thanks, Obama.
Another Holocene Human
@GregB: Guns, like the police, are part of and a symbol of white supremacy. That’s why we can’t have gun control. Northern city dwellers of whatever color are just insufficiently committed to the good project of white supremacy and our rural disappointed-but-at-least-I’m-not-a-******* betters are here to set us straight about our white genociding^1 ways.
1-pretty funny TWIB about that
SRW1
@Punchy:
That would imply a peak in the spring/summer of 2017, followed by a (painfully) slow decline in the percentage of the uninsured.
I hail your boundless optimism in the GOP ‘Replace’ effort.
/s
Patricia Kayden
Yay!! Thank you President Obama.
JoeShabadoo
Its good more people are insured but the exchange has been a pain in my ass recently. They continually ask for more information to ensure my subsidy is correct and despite sending them everything its still not good enough. The people you call at the exchange know absolutely nothing about how to help, can’t even tell me what documents will actually fulfill the requirements and the messages I have got on the exchange have been straight up contradictory in certain parts.
Now I have to appeal my subsidy getting cut in half despite making practically nothing last year and being well below the subsidy line. I don’t even understand why they are doing this since I’ll have to pay it off at tax time next year anyway. If my estimate for income turns out to be too low I would happy about it!
The Raven on the Hill
My family has insurance it can only use in emergencies, at a price we can barely afford.
Yeah, tell us how this is good for us. Oh, I suppose it’s better than nothing (at least, if it doesn’t bankrupt us), but what it really is is coverage we can only use in case of medical catastrophe.
Now, it’s pretty likely our variable income will bump up for a while, and when it does, we’ll be able to afford some of the deferred care. BTW, much of what the ACA calls “preventative care,” normal people call screening tests. So you can get told you have a health risk and, oh, by the way, we want $1000 to find out how bad it is. So stop going on about insurance rates, insurance rates are a proxy. What we need is health care, and there the numbers don’t look nearly so good.
D58826
@Another Holocene Human: BUT BUT BUT what about Benghazi!!!!!!!!!!!
TriassicSands
More good news about the PPACA. It’s sad that if the Republicans weren’t such hate-filled fools the percentage would be effectively zero. The situation has improved greatly under Obamacare, but that doesn’t change the fact that the PPACA is a kluge that is built on a wasteful system that throws billions of dollars away needlessly. We need to get rid of for-profit insurance companies.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@JoeShabadoo:
Call your local hospital and see if they can refer you to a healthcare navigator who can sit down with you and go over everything. That’s probably better than trying to get different phone reps up to speed on your situation.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@TriassicSands:
We need to get rid of for-profit healthcare PROVIDERS. Getting rid of for-profit insurance only goes so far when hospitals expect to make a profit from each patient.
That’s going to be the next big fight — for-profit providers. And it’s going to be ugly as hell.
MomSense
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Unfortunately I think the distinction between for profit and non profit providers is not always clear. Locally our non profit providers often charge more for procedures than the for profit. They find ways to spend that money on capital improvements, salaries, etc.
I think that a better way to deal with it is to change the payment structure from fee for service to a fee for condition with more guidelines about what best practices are for each condition.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@MomSense:
They’re probably playing the same game that Blue Shield was playing here in California — they just had their nonprofit status stripped away and will have to pay back taxes:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-blue-shield-california-20150318-story.html#page=1
I suspect there are a lot of healthcare companies hiding their massive profits behind a claim of being “nonprofit.” And that’s leaving aside the “not for profit” places, which have different rules than nonprofits.
ranchandsyrup
*extreme loser voice* buh buh what about liberty?
TriassicSands
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Everything is ugly now. What we really need to get rid of is the Republican Party, but then what would we do with all the greedy, selfish, racists who vote Republican?