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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 Sunday November 02 2014, @03:35AM
Protip: Romneycare and Obamacare are the same thing.
Actually, there are a few salient differences. Such as for instance the authority under which they were brought in (police power vs taxation power) the precise rules on the insurance companies, the scope (state vs federal), the degree of cooperation and consent achieved in the legislative systems, the entire mechanic of interaction with medicaid expansion, the source and disposition of subsidies, the regulation of medical devices ...
In fact, there's a whole bunch different. And yet, even if they were totally identical except for the name and jurisdiction (which they obviously are not) it would still be putting the federal law under the justification that what's good for Massachusetts is good for Wyoming. The evidence at hand strongly suggest that it's not.
I actually helped people research and set up their PPACA insurance choices. I dealt with them crying when they realised that they were being forced to buy something they couldn't afford to buy, and couldn't afford to use. All I could do was shrug and apologise. I'm sure the numbers sounded good in a mahogany and plush rug conference room on the east coast, but where people have rough hands and deep tans, they're sheer financial murder.
A lot of folks I dealt with walked out, planning to pay a tax penalty and hoping not to get sick.
Your tax dollars at work, folks.