A year after Obamacare passed we had reduced the uninsured population from around 17% to 11%. Since then, aside from a few small wobbles during the pandemic, it's stayed almost completely flat.
There's no excuse for this. The correct number is 0%.
19 thoughts on “Our national shame — Q3 of 2022 edition”
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+1000 -- this and the stupid gun laws in USA are shameful. Ok, those things and the lack of on demand housing and addiction treatment.
Richest country in the world and maybe the universe. Sigh.
A Mk I eyeball trendline suggests we are today where the pre-Obamacare trend was headed.
The slow recovery from the 2008 crises helped....and demographics--more people aging into Medicaid.
Except of course we got there faster in the first couple years. If that trend had continued we might be a a lot closer to zero. So why didn't it ? Well in part because the GOP did everything in their power to impede the ACA . Also, I think everyone always knew the ACA was a huge new experiment and would need lots of adjustments which were impossible to make because of the selfsame GOP.
If there's no penalty for not having insurance, and no exclusion for pre-existing conditions, then why wouldn't a reasonable person just wait until they need it?
Open enrollment is limited to 2 1/2 months a year.
why wouldn't a reasonable person just wait until they need it?
Sure. The Obamacare legislation (or at least what's left of it) indeed incentivizes people to remain uninsured, at least given a typical person's risk-benefit calculus (especially when they're young and healthy).
Not to be that person, but Obamacare passed in 2010. It went into effect in 2014. (The chart is right, the wording not quite right, is what I mean.)
According to experts, that number is going to rise as millions end up losing their Medicaid coverage with the expiration of COVID-related rules that blocked annual checks for qualification.
Still, not enough people care. We're nowhere close to having enough support for Medicare 4 All and now millions of people without insurance will have to pay out of pocket for COVID vaccines costing over $100 and thousands more for antivirals.
Cool system we have. You still don't want to fight for M4A?
Massachusetts estimates about 300,000 persons will be dropped from its Medicaid program. Given that this is Massachusetts and not Alabama, that probably won't translate into an increase in uninsured by quite that number (some people will, perhaps with help from the state government, find alternatives). But still. It's likely to be a sizeable number. And the job market might well weaken this year, so it's not clear that employer-provided plans will make up much of the gap.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/03/01/metro/it-is-going-be-disruptive-masshealth-rolls-set-shrink-by-300000-healey-estimates/
One more state has just, or will soon, get rid of the coverage donate hole and expand Medicare.
I think we should make an effort to call this the Affordable Care Act or ACA, not least because that takes some of the starch out of conservative attempts to dog whistle racism into the discussion. Also, it is a little misleading. Obama signed it into law, just as FDR did with Social Security and LBJ did with Medicare but their names are not on the programs though they are closely associated with these programs for all of history. That's appropriate because the President is just one part of the process. In the case of the ACA, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are the ones who put healthcare reform front and center and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi did a lot of the legislative lifting, Obama, perhaps for good reasons, stayed away from the sausage until it was ready for signing.
My Trump loving Father-in-law got a real awakening on healthcare recently, when seeing the $55,000 bill for cancer treatment infusion meds (plus a few $000 more for applicable services), for which he will need 13 such treatments. He actually understood that if you where uninsured and could not come up with the $750,000 cost of treatment, you were going to die.
My observation, if you want to get the uninsured down to zero, then the federal government must create a program with:
- zero co pays for anything and no caps
- zero payment/cost sharing or administration by the states
- cover all undocumented
- have auto enrollment with no waiting time
Good luck with passing that legislation!
"Good luck with passing that legislation!"
I dunno, all the other countries seemed to have managed it. The US is exceptional, but not *that* exceptional.
aldoushickman - I do not dispute than near universal health care exists in virtually all 'advanced' countries.
Our course, there are some unique challenges to passing what I describe in the US:
- many of these systems were passed long along, when the likely price tag was much lower. They are now entrenched.
- the US political system that makes passing large bills very difficult
- the price tag of the system I describe
- Republicans and red states
- the Supreme Court
etc
The only things that can be passed in the current MAGA controlled House are tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, social spending cuts, cuts for aid to Ukraine, anything to rat fuck the middle class and poor, reductions in SSI, Medicare, and Medicaid expenditures (with the savings passed on to the wealthy), batshit crazy anti woke stuff to "own" the liberals, abortion restrictions, and anti LGBTQ wet dreams for the White Christian Nationalists (aka the current GOP).
So yeah, universal healthcare is unlikely to pass in my lifetime.