Gallup has new data they just released on the amount of people who are uninsured in this country and the results are very good. Actually they are at the lowest levels since 2008.
The uninsured rate has been falling since the fourth quarter of 2013, after hitting an all-time high of 18.0% in the third quarter -- a sign that the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as "Obamacare," appears to be accomplishing its goal of increasing the percentage of Americans with health insurance coverage. Even within this year's first quarter, the uninsured rate fell consistently, from 16.2% in January to 15.6% in February to 15.0% in March. And within March, the rate dropped more than a point, from 15.8% in the first half of the month to 14.7% in the second half -- indicating that enrollment through the healthcare exchanges increased as the March 31 deadline approached.
The results from the first quarter are based on more than 43,500 interviews with U.S. adults from Jan. 2 to March 31, 2014, as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.
The doom-and-gloom conservatives have been projecting about Obamacare has not happened at all so far, but at this point they have no other course to follow since they refuse to help fix the healthcare system in America.
As Jonathan Cohn puts it: “because of Obamacare, more people have health insurance. The question is how many. And it’s going to be a while before anybody knows.”
Still, each Gallup finding raises a question: How much longer can Republicans continue to pretend the law’s beneficiaries don’t exist?
The Republican response to news that Obamacare has hit seven million sign-ups has been to assert that we don’t know how many people previously were covered. That’s a fair point — even proponents of the law raise it, in arguing for caution about what the seven million number really tells us. But as Larry Levitt has explained, Gallup’s continuing findings will count as further evidence that the net number of uninsured is indeed falling.
We have to be cautious about how Obamacare will ultimately work out, but calling it a unmitigated disaster and a failure by the Bobby Jindals is laughable. And Mitch McConnell is in a real pickle since Kentucky has been a raging success for Obamacare.
Mitch McConnell is hanging on to this claim by his fingernails, falsely insisting that this is the case in Kentucky, where hundreds of thousands have signed up through kynect, the state exchange.
And so you’ll continue to hear GOP lawmakers continue to paint the law — in rhetorical terms — as a uniform disaster. But that’s only part of the story. Some leading GOP candidates are, in fact, indicating an awareness that the politics of the law are shifting: North Carolina GOP Senate candidate Thom Tillis says that of coursehe’d replace Obamacare with something-or-other that accomplishes the same goals as Obamacare does.
Michigan GOP Senate candidate Terri Land is making nice noisesabout the Medicaid expansion in the state. Scott Brown is equivocating on the expansion in New Hampshire. So you actually are seeing some GOP candidates attempting to adapt to a new reality in which Obamacare could actually work, even as they continue to denounce it as an irrevocable catastrophe.
It's a crime that so many red states are refusing to expand Medicaid in their states and as the ACA succeeds, I hope the voters kick all the bums out.
