{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Number of Americans without health insurance falls as income and poverty rate stay level - The Washington Post
|
3:25 PM |
No comments |
Number of Americans without health insurance falls as income and poverty rate stay level
Five-year-old Jumaane Cook (R) holds a sign alongside supporters of the Affordable Care Act during a rally outside the Supreme Court prior to the high court's hearing a second major challenge to the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, earlier this year. (EPA/JIM LO SCALZO)
The proportion of Americans who lack health insurance took a big dip last year, with nearly 9 million people gaining coverage since 2013, according to federal figures announced Wednesday morning.
The new figures, from the large annual Census survey that measures American's well-being in several ways, are the most solid evidence to date of the impact that the Affordable Care Act has had since its main coverage provisions took effect in 2014.
They show that the share of people across the country who were uninsured throughout the year fell from 13.3 percent in 2013 to 10.4 percent last year.
The report, hailed by ACA supporters, is the first that compares the insurance landscape immediately before those changes began and afterwards.
At the same time, the nation's official poverty rate stayed level at 14.8 percent, equivalent to 46.7 million people in poverty. A supplemental poverty measure, considered more accurate by many experts, showed the rate at 15.3 percent, similar to 2013.
Meanwhile, wages continued a long stagnation, with the median household income remaining at $53,657, effectively the same, after adjusting for inflation, as the year before, showing why so many Americans feel that they have not experienced a major improvement in their economic prospects.
This marks the third consecutive year in which median incomes for Americans remained constant. Income remains 6.5 percent lower than in 2007.
Income inequality remained high in 2014 and statistically indistinguishable from the situation in 2013. The top five percent of Americans earned 21.9 percent of income in 2014. The bottom fifth of Americans earned three percent.
The Gini index, a common measure of inequality, was 0.480 in 2014, not statistically different the prior year. The Gini index — and therefore, inequality — has been climbing in recent decades. It was 0.454 in 1993, the earliest year for which there are comparable data.
Spreading health insurance to more Americans was a main purpose of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. But from the outset, it was clear that it would take years for firm evidence to materialize of whether the law was succeeding at that goal.
The two big strategies built into the law to widen access to health coverage — insurance exchanges selling private health plans to people who cannot get insurance through a job, and an expansion of Medicaid for people with lower incomes — took effect at the start of 2014.
Other surveys lately have indicated that more Americans have been gaining insurance. But another looming question that the new report helps to answer is how much of this expanded coverage flows from the law and how much is because the nation has been recovering from the Great Recession, so that more people are being hired into jobs that come with health benefits.
Overall, the Census figures show that, overall, most Americans continue to get health benefits through their job. The proportion of people with such employer-based coverage last year was 55.4 percent, very similar to the year before.
But among difference sources of insurance, the biggest increase last year was among what the Census calls "direct purchase" – people buying health policies on their own. That includes, though is not limited to, people buying health plans through the new federal and state insurance marketplaces created under the federal health care law. The share of coverage that was directly purchased increased by 3.2 last year to account for nearly 15 percent of those with health insurance.
The data also show that part-time workers and people who do not have a job continued to be uninsured last year at rates higher than that for full-time workers. Still, those two groups had sharper gains in coverage than people who worked full-time during the entire year, with a particularly large drop – of 6.3 percentage points – in part-time workers who were uninsured in 2014, compared with the year before.
The nation's two largest public insurance programs also expanded last year, with Medicaid coverage for low-income people growing more rapidly than Medicare, the federal program for older Americans. As a result of a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that each state had the latitude to decide whether or not to expand the program to fold in people with slightly higher incomes than most states had allowed in the past.
The report points to a checkerboard pattern across the country that has emerged as a result of that court ruling, with states that had expanded their Medicaid programs showing bigger drops in uninsured residents than states that had not. The only states in which the ranks of the uninsured dropped last year by at least 3.5 percentage points or more were states that had expanded Medicaid. The report, however, does now show the effect on coverage for the specific group of people for whom the expansion envisions in the health-care law was intended – those whose incomes were between the federal poverty level and 138 percent of the poverty level.
Wednesday's report makes clear, though, that the odds of having health insurance in the United States is linked closely to their overall financial well-being. About one in six people with incomes of $25,000 were uninsured, compared with about one in 20 people earning $100,000 or more. Racial and ethnic disparities also persist.
Nearly one in five Hispanics remained uninsured last year, compared with fewer than one in 10 whites. Such disparities lingered, even though gains in coverage were about twice as large last year for Hispanics, African Americans and Asians than for whites.
Meanwhile, the data show, nearly six years since the official end of the recession, the economy was still tough on middle- and low-income families, who have seen only slight improvements to their earnings. In 2013, the poverty rate fell for the first time since 2006, while inequality hovered at the highest it has been since at least the 90s.
The Census Bureau's definition of poverty is a rule of thumb developed in the 1960s that is based on triple the minimum amount of money that a household might need to buy food.
Correction: This story previously had an incorrect figure for the percentage of uninsured in 2013. It's been corrected.
Amy Goldstein is a national reporter for The Washington Post focused on health-care policy.
Jeff Guo is a staff writer for Storyline. He's from Maryland (but outside the Beltway). Follow him on Twitter:
@_jeffguo.
Lazaro Gamio makes interactive graphics for The Washington Post. Before coming to the Post, he worked for The Miami Herald, and interned for The Seattle Times and National Geographic.
0 comments:
Post a Comment