Nearly 200000 more Wisconsin residents gained health insurance

The number of Americans without health insurance declined to 9.1 percent past year, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, originally called for an expansion of Medicaid eligibility to people who make up to 138 percent of the poverty level.

The Census Bureau has found a significant drop in the uninsured rate since 2013, before ObamaCare’s coverage expansion went into effect.

Despite Obamacare and its individual mandate and expansion of Medicaid, 9.1 percent of the population in the United States remained uninsured a year ago.

New data shows almost 200,000 Wisconsin residents gained some form of health insurance between 2013 and 2015. For example, some Utahns receive federal subsidies through the ACA to help them pay health insurance premiums. The drops in the uninsured rate were bigger for people who made below the poverty level or up to 399 percent of the poverty level in states that expanded Medicaid.

“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. It is quite clear from the two maps below, the non-expansion states tend to have higher rates of uninsurance. The uninsured rate has decreased by 1.3 percentage points from 2014, the report said.

The report broke down coverage by a variety of metrics, including by state. A footnote to the Table states: “The estimates by type of coverage are not mutually exclusive; people can be covered by more than one type of health insurance during the year”.

The table lists 28,966,000 as “uninsured”. While no singular cause is to blame, critics have highlighted restrictions to reproductive healthcare access and the decision not to expand medicaid coverage.

Among healthcare’s subsectors, outpatient care centers saw the most growth from the same period past year, at 9.2 percent.