November 11, 2014
The NYT likely misled readers in the concluding paragraph of an article on projections for enrollment in the health care exchanges next year. It concluded:
“In a brief analysis of coverage trends, the Department of Health and Human Services said Monday that ‘most of the new marketplace enrollment for 2015 is likely to come from the ranks of the uninsured,’ rather than from people who previously bought insurance on their own outside the exchanges.”
Actually, people routinely go between being uninsured and insured primarily because they find and leave jobs that provide insurance. Every month roughly 4.4 million workers leave a job. Many of these workers are leaving jobs with insurance and becoming uninsured. If these people sign up for the exchanges after going two or three months without insurance, should they be viewed as uninsured or as people who previously had insurance from another source? It’s not clear that this distinction is very meaningful.
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