At 10%, Uninsured Rate Hits New Low — And The Republican Cabal Is Keeping It From Single Digits

by Jesse Berney

The Urban Institute’s regular survey of insurance rates in America has found for the first time that only 10 percent of nonelderly adults in the United States don’t have health insurance, a dramatic change since the Affordable Care Act went into effect.
It’s even lower in states that have accepted federal funds to expand Medicaid; in those states the rate is at 7.5 percent.
But in states where legislatures and governors have refused to allow the Medicaid expansion called for in the ACA, the rate stands at 14.4 percent — nearly twice as high.
It was the Supreme Court who ruled states could opt out of the Medicaid expansion, but it was Republican politicians — almost exclusively — who stood in the way of states accepting hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to help some of the most vulnerable families, those just outside the poverty line, from getting coverage.
Obamacare has done a lot to bring that number down: keeping young people on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26, creating the exchanges, mandating coverage. But the Medicaid expansion has been essential to getting millions of people the insurance they desperately need, and the GOP is continuing to let petty politics stand in the way of helping the people they represent.
The number will likely drop into single digits soon, unless the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare in King v. Burwell. But it could get there much faster — instantaneously — if the states that haven’t accepted Medicaid expansion finally put it into place.