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We know that about 10 million more people have insurance coverage this year as a result of the Affordable Care Act but until now it has been difficult to say much about who was getting that Obamacare coverage — where they live, their age, their income and other such details. Now Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz report in the NYT that a new data set is providing a clearer picture of which people gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The data is the output of a statistical model based on a large survey of adults and shows that the law has done something rather unusual in the American economy this century: It has pushed back against inequality, essentially redistributing income — in the form of health insurance or insurance subsidies — to many of the groups that have fared poorly over the last few decades. The biggest winners from the law include people between the ages of 18 and 34; blacks; Hispanics; and people who live in rural areas. The areas with the largest increases in the health insurance rate, for example, include rural Arkansas and Nevada; southern Texas; large swaths of New Mexico, Kentucky and West Virginia; and much of inland California and Oregon.
Despite many Republican voters’ disdain for the Affordable Care Act, parts of the country that lean the most heavily Republican (according to 2012 presidential election results) showed significantly more insurance gains than places where voters lean strongly Democratic. That partly reflects underlying rates of insurance. In liberal places, like Massachusetts and Hawaii, previous state policies had made insurance coverage much more widespread, leaving less room for improvement. But the correlation also reflects trends in wealth and poverty. Many of the poorest and most rural states in the country tend to favor Republican politicians.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:24PM
Your opinion could very well change if you were ever to be taxed at only 25%, rather than the 70% or more taxation rate you've only ever experienced. You'd soon come to like having greater control over how the money you've earned is spent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @12:35PM
This always seems to be the argument for people who haven't looked at the numbers.
The American tax payers pay £3700 per person per year for health care, plus insurance on top of that. In the UK for example universal healthcare cost the tax payer $3200 per person per year.
So you're not controlling what you spend your money on, you're spending more money to get less because you're paying for the inefficiencies of having hundreds of insurance companies doing administration, and thousands of hospital and doctors all doing the same, plus lining the pockets of share holders and executives in all those miriad companies.
Your argument would work if you were paying less, but each and every person in the US is paying more for private healthcare than they would under a public healthcare system. And the worst thing is that the republican's and the insurance companies have got you all convinced that saving money and having better access to healthcare is against your best interests.
How many turkey's have to get eaten before you all stop voting for Christmas?
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Friday October 31 2014, @02:30PM
The extra money which the U.S. puts forward means that we don't have to have pages describing our health care such as:
http://www.nhs.uk/choiceintheNHS/Rightsandpledges/Waitingtimes/Pages/Guide%20to%20waiting%20times.aspx [www.nhs.uk]
Says something that the top search result for: http://www.google.com/search?q=us+health+care+wait+for+MRI [google.com] is for Canada, no?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @02:45PM
> The extra money which the U.S. puts forward means that we don't have to have pages describing our health care such as:
No, the reason we don't have pages like that is because for a lot of people the wait list is infinite. Everybody on the highway can drive fast when it isn't rush hour.