16M fewer uninsured since ObamaCare, study finds

A new Gallup survey asking Americans if they have health insurance shows that in every state except Wyoming, the proportion of residents without health insurance has dropped since the major provisions of the Affordable Care Act – state- and federal-run insurance exchanges and an expansion of the federal Medicaid program – went into effect at the end of 2013. Among children under age 18 years old, the percentage with private coverage increased by nearly 4 percentage points – from 52.6% in 2013 to 56.3% in the first quarter of 2015, “reversing a 14-year trend of declining rates of private coverage”.

“Not surprisingly, Gallup found seven of the 10 states with the greatest reduction in the uninsured have followed the same path as Kentucky by expanding Medicaid and establishing a state-based exchange”, Beshear said.

Roughly 7 million Americans who are waking up with health insurance today woke up without it a year ago. In 2012, for example, U.S. Census estimates pegged Connecticut’s uninsured rate at 8.1 percent of the population.

While the report does not link the decline to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, it does reflect the time period that the federally mandated health insurance was put into place. Alaska Gov. Bill Walker recently announced he would pursue Medicaid expansion over the objection of his state’s legislature, and deep red Utah has also moved toward a modified form of Medicaid expansion in recent months. Among Hispanics ages 18-64, the proportion who were uninsured dropped from 40.6 percent in 2013 to 28.3 percent in the first quarter of this year, The Times reported.

“This is good news for Maine in that it shows the ACA is in place, it’s working and people are getting covered”, said Wendy Wolf, president and CEO of the Maine Health Access Foundation, a nonprofit that strives to improve health insurance coverage. For Americans aged 18 to 64, the uninsured rate fell to 13 percent from January to March of this year from 16.3 percent in 2014. The Supreme Court ruling in the King v. Burwell case preserved subsidies for qualifying, low-income adults in states that have defaulted to the federal exchange rather than set up their own locally managed and promoted insurance marketplaces. Rhode Island’s 2.7 percent is the lowest and with 20.8 percent uninsured Texans without coverage fare the worst.

“This is happening as uninsured rates for most states have continued to decline”. Arkansas’s border state neighbors all have higher uninsured rates, though all have seen declines in the uninsured since the ACA was enacted.

Gallup and health consultant group Healthways used a random sample of 178,072 adults in 2013 and compared them to 88,667 adults through the first half of 2015.

States that expanded Medicaid are marked with asterisks.