Statisticians Study Who Was Helped Most By Obamacare

HughPickens.com writes 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.

Comments

Re:how many small businesses has Obama killed?

[Lumpy]

The same number that Romneycare killed. remember, Obamacare is BASED ON good Ol' Mitt Romney, the GOP shining example's own Romney care that he put in place in his home state.

Are republicans so stupid that they can not see it's a Republican system? Because as a Democrat I wanted a system closer to Canadian Healthcare as it works.

Repubs made sure the insurance companies would be happy with it so they could get max profits. And that is what we got...... Romneycare.

Re:Lemme guess

[Gr8Apes]

Doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, patients and employers have only had unneeded and unwanted intrusion, regulation and control into all their interrelationships. None of them benefit. The Government (i.e., "the people of the government" or the ruling class) are the only winners. Everyone else pays and loses at their expense.

Seriously? Insurance companies are part of the problem in health care, interfering with doctors, patients, and hospitals in providing/receiving care. They need to be regulated to doing their job (providing averaged risk assessment policies) and stay out of the hospitals and doctors business.

Re:Redistribution

[laird]

"Not sure how well the mobile part works when you actually have to pay for the insurance"

ACA helps because when you switch jobs, you know that you can get reasonably priced insurance afterwards. And because the insurance companies can no longer use the job change to declare any current medical conditions "pre-existing" and deny you insurance.

Previously there are _many_ people trapped in jobs for the health insurance, because if they went to a startup or became an independent consultant they had to pay absurdly high rates for insurance. Or because they had any medical condition that the new insurance company didn't want to cover they'd be denied insurance completely if they change jobs.

Re:Redistribution

[dmr001]

As a physician, the new system doesn't feel particularly more intrusive than what we had previously. What we do have is a lot of new patients who were previously uninsured. They don't seem angry about it; they seem happy (to a person, at least amongst the newly insured). And we can get to work preventing their modest problems from turning into gigantic, expensive once that got handled "for free" in the emergency department by spreading the cost of their uncompensated care around to everyone else.

Some of our previously insured patients seemed miffed because, just like before, medical care is expensive and the system is complicated. Some of them who used to blame the insurance companies now blame Obamacare.

Re:how many small businesses has Obama killed?

[TheNastyInThePasty]

Lets look at the history of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Back in 2008, then-presidential nominee Barack Obama ran a campaign with healthcare reform as one of its central issues. He advocated for universal healthcare but opposed an individual mandate. However, after input from experts that claimed that government-guaranteed healthcare would encourage too many free-riders, Obama decided to include an individual mandate as a central part of his healthcare reform efforts.

The individual mandate is largely credited as an idea by the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation as an alternative to a system in which the government pays for healthcare. It required each person to pay for their own healthcare and was proposed by Republicans during the Clinton era as a free-market solution that embodies the tenant of personal responsibility that Republicans claim to hold.

Once adopted by the Democrats and proposed in a bill on September 17, 2009, the Republicans staunchly opposed the measure. The Republicans, some of whom have been around long enough to have supported a similar bill during the Clinton administration, claimed that the individual mandate was an unconstitutional assault on freedom.

After 3 weeks of debate and town hall meetings, the bill passed through the House of Representatives and was sent to the Senate. The Democrats attempted to gain the support of moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe, Bob Bennet, Mike Enzi, and Chuck Grassley. However, the moderate Republicans found themselves subject to intense pressure by the party to fall in line and oppose any healthcare reform effots.

The bill continued to be opposed by conservatives in the Senate who claimed that the bill's "public option" was a deal-breaker. The public option was government-run healthcare insurance that would be available to people alongside private health insurance in the market. Conservatives claimed that the public option would put private insurance out of business because the government is under no pressure to compete or turn a profit. After over 3 months of debate, the public option was dropped from the bill. Senator Grassley was quoted as saying:

"No public option. No play-or-pay. No things that are going to lead to any rationing of health care. No interference with the doctor-patient relationship," says Grassley. "About the only place we haven't made progress along the lines of what Republicans are wanting on the bill is in tort reform."

Despite this, it still took several last-minute concessions for conservatives to get the bill passed through the Senate on December 24, 2009, with support from independents and conservative Democrats to overcome the Republican threat of fillibuster.

The bill languished in the House of Representatives for 3 more months. In order to gets the admendments made to the bill back in the House, the Democrats had to win support from pro-life Representatives who worried that the bill would allow federal funds to be used to pay for abortions. To assuage anti-abortion politicians' fears, Barack Obama signed an executive order on March 21, 2010 to affirm that no federal funds could or would be used to fund abortions. The amendments were finally passed through the House and signed into law by Obama on March 23, 2010 (over 6 months after being proposed).