October 03, 2016
The NYT had a major article on the problems of the health care exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The piece implied that the problem is that too many people are opting to go without insurance, even bringing up the silly old line about the lack of young healthy people. (The exchanges need healthy people, it doesn’t matter if they are young. In fact, older healthy people are more profitable since they pay higher premiums.)
In fact, fewer people are going without insurance than had been predicted when the ACA was passed. In 2012, before the key provisions of the ACA took effect, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the uninsured population would fall to 32 million by 2015. In fact, it fell to 32 million by 2014, a year in which it was projected there would still be 38 million uninsured people. According to data from Gallup, the number of uninsured non-elderly fell to less than 28 million by the fourth quarter of 2015. (The 2012 projections also assumed that all states would expand Medicaid since it preceded the Supreme Court ruling that allowed states to opt out.)
The reason that the health care exchanges have had lower than predicted enrollments is that fewer employers have dropped employer based insurance than expected. This is the sort of thing that a major article on unexpected problems in the exchanges should have noted.
Comments