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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: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Friday October 31 2014, @03:18PM
Reading the threads here and on the other site is like listening to creationists try to justify a 6,000 year old world.
Here is a though. Maybe don't work backwards from the unassailable fact that Obamacare is bad.
There are finally some actual stats coming out of this thing. How about we evaluate the stats and use that to determine whether it is good or not?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 31 2014, @05:10PM
Stats can be manipulated. They will leave out all the small business put out of business or people that lost their old policies and had to get that crap they are pushing.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday October 31 2014, @05:48PM
Good job proving my point. Da
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Friday October 31 2014, @07:39PM
You are absolutely correct. Never trust measurements and data! What we need is truthiness [wikipedia.org]!
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 1) by goody on Saturday November 01 2014, @02:54AM
Right, the small businesses with less than 50 people which were exempt from the employer mandate and the people who lost their policies which didn't meet minimum requirements but got better policies in exchanges. Somehow I doubt any stats matter to you.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 31 2014, @07:24PM
Actually, it is bad. That's a reasonable place to start. But the reason that it's bad is that it left the insurance companies in the loop. The only conceivable place for insurance companies in the system would be to cover major medical. Insurance is a bad model to use for a service that everyone is going to use, and it's bad because it increases the expense, slows the process, etc. If the doctors could cut their paperwork in half, they could do a much better job.
OTOH, you could look at it as a rather expensive jobs program. So it does have some benefits.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Saturday November 01 2014, @06:36AM
i agree, it is bad. there's a lot of room for improvement. what we had before though was much, much worse. usually when somebody starts with "obamacare is terrible" they're advocating for its repeal, to go back to even worse, rather than advocating for improvements.
rather than talking about how much obamacare sucks and about all its flaws, how about we discuss how it can be improved?