Gains made in insurance rates under Obamacare are beginning to reverse – By Joan McCarter (dailykos.com) / May 2 2018
What might have been statistical noise in January—a 1.3 point increase in the uninsured rates—is looking more like a trend. People are losing health insurance, and the gains made by the Affordable Care Act are being eroded according to a new Commonwealth Fund ACA Tracking Survey.
They find that the percentage of 19-to-64-year-olds without insurance “is at 15.5 percent, up from 12.7 percent in 2016, meaning an estimated 4 million people lost coverage. Rates were up significantly compared with 2016 among adults with lower incomes—those living in households earning less than 250 percent of poverty (about $30,000 for an individual and $61,000 for a family of four).” In states that didn’t expand Medicaid the percentage of uninsured people is even higher at 21.9 percent, up from 16.1 percent in the same period in 2016.
The coverage declines are likely the result of two major factors: 1) lack of federal legislative actions to improve specific weaknesses in the ACA and 2) actions by the current administration that have exacerbated those weaknesses. These include the administration’s deep cuts in advertising and outreach during the marketplace open-enrollment periods, a shorter open enrollment period, and other actions that collectively may have left people with a general sense of confusion about the status of the law. Signs point to further erosion of insurance coverage in 2019: the repeal of the individual mandate penalty included in the 2017 tax law, recent actions to increase the availability of insurance policies that don’t comply with ACA minimum benefit standards, and support for Medicaid work requirements.
The erosion of coverage is going to begin this fall, when insurance companies set their premium rate in the absence of the individual mandate. It’s not going to be pretty. There’s a reason health care remains a key concern among voters, and has played out in elections since last fall in favor of Democrats.
