ACA Open Enrollment Round 3: The Going Gets Tougher

This article assumes the ACA will be in place over the next five years even if a Republican becomes president in 2017.) Health insurance numbers can be confusing (and hyped out of context from both sides of the political aisle), so here’s a quick rundown of the current situation and the Obama Administration’s new projections. The current U.S. population is 326 million. According to the Census Bureau’s latest authoritative annual report (released in Sept) 10.4% of the population, or 33 million people, were uninsured for the entire year in 2014. That’s down sharply from 13.3%, or 41.8 million people, in 2013. Thus, as of the end of 2014, there were 8.8 million fewer uninsured people, due primarily to Obamacare. Some details:  66% percent of the population had private sector coverage and 34% had government coverage; 55.4% were covered through their own or a family member’s job; 19.5% had Medicaid; 16% had Medicare; 14.6% had coverage they bought themselves and 4.5% had military coverage. (The breakdown exceeds 100% because of coverage transitions during the year, which affect about 20% of the population.) As would be expected post-ACA, the biggest change from 2013 to 2014 was in direct-purchase (buy your own) coverage and Medicaid. Direct-purchase (inside and outside the exchanges) ticked up 3.2 percentage points, to 14.6% of the population in 2014 from 11.4% in 2013. Medicaid coverage rose by 2 percentage points to 19.5%of the population in 2014 from 17.5% in 2013. ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Steven Findlay Source Type: blogs