The Urban Institute
released its Health Reform Monitoring Survey (HRMS) for the last quarter, reaffirming all the good—and mixed—news that we've been hearing about the impact of Obamacare. Top line results—a dramatic drop in the uninsured population.
- The number of uninsured nonelderly adults fell by an estimated 10.6 million between September 2013 and September 2014 as the uninsurance rate fell from 17.7 percent to 12.4 percent—a drop of 30.1 percent.
- Most of the gain in coverage was among the low- and middle-income adults targeted by the ACA's Medicaid and Marketplace provisions.
In other words, the law is working as intended. Mostly. Here's where it's not, thanks largely to the U.S. Supreme Court and its decision to allow states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion.
- The uninsurance rate dropped 36.3 percent in states that implemented the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, compared with 23.9 percent in nonexpansion states; 54.7 percent of uninsured nonelderly adults lived in nonexpansion states in September 2014. [emphasis added]
The gains, according to a
statement from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation which partnered in the study, were felt "across all age, gender, race and ethnicity groups." That's even with all of the states refusing Medicaid expansion.
What those statistics boil down to are human lives, and in many cases, human lives saved. Just as millions of people were stripped of even the hope of getting coverage by the Supreme Court's Medicaid decision, so the court could decide to actually take health insurance away from millions more. That's just something for Chief Justice John Roberts to mull over.