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Sara Kliff: Survey: 57 Percent Of Obamacare Enrollees Were Previously Uninsured
A slim majority of Obamacare’s private insurance enrollees were uninsured when they signed up for coverage, a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds. Obamacare opponents have regularly argued that most enrollees already had coverage, meaning that health reform wasn’t driving down the uninsured rate. The new Kaiser survey, which uses a randomly-selected panel of 742 people who bought private coverage through the new exchanges,
finds that 57 percent of those who signed up for private coverage didn’t have an insurance plan when they enrolled. The Kaiser survey suggests that most people who bought on the marketplace weren’t trying to replace a plan they already had. They were people who lacked insurance coverage, and were using the new health care law to gain access to a plan they didn’t have before.
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Mother Jones: About Half of Obamacare Exchange Enrollees Were Previously Uninsured
A new Kaiser survey shows that 57 percent of those who bought health insurance on Obamacare exchanges were previously uninsured. That’s about 4.5 million people who gained private insurance via the exchanges, and the vast majority of them say they would have remained uninsured if not for Obamacare. If this number is correct, it suggests that the number of newly insured by the end of the year will be a little higher than I’ve projected before—perhaps around 11-13 million.
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Tara Culp-Ressler: Young Adults Got Healthier And More Financially Stable After Obamacare Was Implemented
Obamacare’s efforts to expand access to health insurance for young Americans may be helping them maintain better health and financial security, according to a large new study analyzing the impact of health care reform over the past four years. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Wednesday, found that young Americans are now reporting better physical and mental health and their out-of-pocket medical expenses have declined. “The health insurance that people are gaining seems to be doing what it is supposed to do,” Dr. Kao-Ping Chua, a pediatrician at Boston’s Children’s Hospital and the lead author of the study, told the Los Angeles Times. In 2010, Obamacare began allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ health insurance plans until the age of 26. Since then, several surveys have found that the rate of uninsurance among that population has sharply declined. The JAMA study is one of the first to attempt to more broadly measure the impact of this aspect of the Affordable Care Act in the four years since it took effect.
In order to assess Obamacare’s impact, the researchers analyzed annual survey data collected between 2002 and 2011, before and after the coverage provision’s implementation. They tracked information from more than 60,000 people who fell into one of two different groups: young people between the ages of 19 to 25, who became newly eligible to remain dependents on their parents’ plans, and a control group of older adults between the ages of 26 to 34 who could not take advantage of that provision. Some significant differences emerged between the two populations. Among the younger group, there was a 6.2 percentage point increase in people reporting excellent physical health, as well as a 4 percentage point increase in people reporting excellent mental health. That group was also more likely to be insured, and experienced an 18 percent decline in their annual out-of-pocket medical costs.
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