Survey: Health insurance gains pick up

March 11, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — A major new survey finds that a growing
percentage of Americans gained health insurance as the initial sign-up
season for President Barack Obama’s health care law drew to a close last
month.
Released Monday, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index
measured the share of adults without health insurance. That shrank from
17.1 percent at the end of last year to 15.6 percent for the first three
months of 2014.
The decline of 1.5 percentage points would
translate roughly to more than 3.5 million people gaining coverage. The
trend accelerated as the March 31 enrollment deadline loomed.
"The
Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as ‘Obamacare,’ appears to be
accomplishing its goal of increasing the percentage of Americans with
health insurance," said Gallup’s analysis of the findings.
The
survey is important because it combines the quick turnaround of media
polls with extensive outreach usually seen in government research.
Gallup interviewed more than 43,500 adults, or more than 40 times the
number in a typical national media poll.
Coming a week after the
close of the health care law’s first enrollment season, Gallup’s numbers
suggest a more modest impact on coverage than statistics cited by the
Obama administration.
The administration says 7.1 million have
signed up for subsidized private plans through new insurance markets,
while 3 million previously uninsured people gained coverage through the
law’s Medicaid expansion. Millions more remain potentially eligible for
marketplace coverage under various extensions the administration has
issued.
However, those numbers are not comparable with Gallup’s.
The
White House figure of 7.1 million insurance exchange sign-ups includes
insured people who switched their previous coverage, as well as people
who have not paid their first month’s premium, and who would therefore
still be uninsured.
Also, Gallup is counting just adults, while the administration figures include children as well.
It may take much of the rest of the year to get a true bottom line of the health care law’s impact on
coverage.
But
Gallup’s numbers do show an improving trend. The share of Americans
without coverage is at its lowest since late 2008, before Obama took
office, the survey found.
That’s independent validation for the
White House, and it also helps calm concerns about the fallout from last
fall’s wave of insurance cancellations.
Some feared the
cancellations of more than 4.7 million policies that didn’t measure up
to the law’s standards would actually swell the ranks of uninsured
people. That created huge political problems for Obama, who had promised
Americans they could keep their insurance if they liked it.
About half the states authorized extensions belatedly granted by the White House.
Gallup found the biggest insurance gains were among lower-income people and among African-Americans.
Among
people with household incomes of less than $36,000 a year, the share of
uninsured shrank by 3.2 percentage points from levels at the end of
2013.
African-Americans saw their uninsured rate drop by 3.3 percentage points.
Although
the proportion of Hispanics without coverage fell by 1.7 percentage
points, Latinos remained more likely than any racial or ethnic group to
lack access, with 37 percent uninsured.
Gallup found gains in
coverage among all age groups, but not much evidence of a late surge of
younger people that the administration had hoped for to help keep
premiums in check.
Results were based on telephone interviews
conducted Jan. 2 -March 31 with a random sample of 43,562 adults 18 and
older living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. For results based on
the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is
plus or minus 1 percentage point at the 95 percent confidence level.
___
Online:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/168248/uninsured-rate-lowest-2008.aspx

No posts to display