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posted by LaminatorX on Friday October 31 2014, @07:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the take-your-medicine dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @01:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @01:55PM (#111900)

    In the current system, the cost of services is completely made up. The cost of an MRI doesn't depend upon how much it costs to run the machine, it is priced upon the highest value that an insurance company will pay for a scan. Tell me the labor cost of the tech and running the machine costs the $5k/person they charge, so if they run 20 people through the machine in a day, you gonna tell me it costs $100k/day to run the machine??? You'd be off by two orders of magnitude. Since they can't charge different rates to different people, the uninsured are on the hook for the full $5k.

    Other than cries of socialism from people who apparently don't know what the word means, I have a very hard time seeing why health service costs are not regulated like electricity rates, water, rates, etc. Many of the same arguments for classifying ISPs as common carriers applies to health care services, but you don't hear too many people around here call that socialism, largely because they feel that in their own pockets as opposed to caring about some ficticious "welfare queen".

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 31 2014, @08:26PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Friday October 31 2014, @08:26PM (#112049) Homepage Journal

    I've no problem regulating healthcare. I've damned sure no problem regulating insurance agencies. I have a big problem with moving us to pay for it or go to prison, because that's what's effectively being said.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.