As Medicaid loses stigma, election may cloud its future, By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar (AP), October 24, 2016, Philadelphia Inquirer: “Medicaid, often stigmatized among government health care programs, is finally coming into its own. The federal-state program for low-income people has been scarcely debated in the turbulent presidential election, but it faces real consequences depending on who wins the White House in the Nov. 8 vote. Under President Barack Obama, Medicaid has expanded to cover more than 70 million people and shed much of the social disapproval from its earlier years as a welfare program. Two big industries – insurers and hospitals – have a declared stake in the future of the program, which costs more than $530 billion a year. Insurers are leading a new ‘Modern Medicaid Alliance’ to educate lawmakers about how the program has moved closer to private coverage…”
Tag: Affordable Care Act (ACA)
Health Insurance Coverage
- Obamacare led to similar drops in uninsured rate across all income groups, By Dan Mangan, September 29, 2016, CNBC: “A new report on the effects of health insurance expansion under Obamacare found that every income group ‘experienced significant and similar drops’ in the rate of uninsured people. ‘The uninsured rate fell by around 40 percent for Americans in all income groups for 2010 through 2015, including individuals with incomes above 400 percent of the federal poverty level,’ the U.S. Health and Human Services Department said Thursday…”
- 600,000 Veterans may go without health insurance next year: Report, By Maggie Fox, September 29, 2016, NBC News: “More than 600,000 veterans will go without health insurance next year unless 19 states stop holding out against expanding Medicaid, researchers said Wednesday. Even with Medicaid expansion, hundreds of thousands of vets are going to go without a way to pay for medical care, the report from the left-leaning Urban Institute finds. But 327,000 of those who will go without health insurance live in the 19 states — all with Republican governors — that have not expanded Medicaid, the researchers said…”
Health Insurance in the United States: 2015
- Uninsurance rate drops to the lowest level since before the Great Recession, By Amy Goldstein, September 13, 2016, Washington Post: “About 4 million Americans gained health insurance last year, decreasing the nation’s uninsured rate to 9.1 percent, the lowest level since before the Great Recession, according to new federal figures. The figures, released Tuesday from a large annual Census Bureau survey, show that the gains were driven primarily by an expansion of coverage among people buying individual policies, rather than getting health benefits through a job. This includes, but is not limited to, the kind of coverage sold on the insurance exchanges that began in 2014 under the Affordable Care Act…”
- The striking difference between states that expanded Medicaid and the ones that didn’t, By Carolyn Y. Johnson, September 13, 2016, Washington Post: “The number of Americans without health insurance declined to 9.1 percent last year, according to federal data released Tuesday. A set of maps released by the Census Bureau suggests an obvious way to decrease the uninsured rate even more: expand Medicaid in the 19 states that haven’t…”