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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: 2) by zocalo on Saturday November 01 2014, @11:53AM
The bit about the city folk does touch on an interesting point though. The split between the two main parties isn't really a state-by-state thing, it's a rural vs. urban thing. A far better split currently would be to say that most Democrats tend live in urban areas while Republicans seem to prefer the countryside, something backed up by the purple heat maps of how people vote across the US on a county by county basis, even if that doesn't align with how the Electoral College works. Those states that have more urban voters tend to be those than swing Democract while those that are more rural tend to swing towards the Republicans, although how long it will stay that way is anyone's guess.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!