President Obama signing the Affordable Care Act
There's a reason Mitt Romney had such a hard time talking about what he'd repeal from Obamacare when he went on
Meet the Press Sunday. That's because a couple of the primary things he talked about—pre-existing conditions and letting parents keep their adult children on their policies—are turning out to be pretty damned popular. Popular and, in the case of the latter, which was implemented immediately after passage of the law,
effective.
WASHINGTON — The share of young adults without health insurance fell by one-sixth in 2011 from the previous year, the largest annual decline for any age group since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began collecting the data in 1997, according to a new report released on Monday.
The estimates are drawn from a federal survey of about 35,000 households. It did not ask how the newly insured obtained coverage, but the study’s author,Matthew Broaddus, a research analyst at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the increased coverage for young people was almost certainly due to a provision in the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act that allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance policies until their 26th birthday.
Joseph Antos, a health care policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that the provision of the new law was the only plausible explanation for the increase.
That's a reduction from 34 percent to 28 percent of people 19-25 who are uninsured, in just one year. That amounts to 1.6 million more people who have health insurance. One of the reasons analysts credit the new law with the decrease in the uninsured population in that age group is the next group up, 26 to 35 years, saw an increase in their share of the total uninsured population.
Romney says he'd preserve that aspect of the law, as if he'd get right to work on creating new laws to expand health insurance once he erased Obamacare from existence. Because, as a Romney campaign spokesperson made clear after Romney made a mess out of his MTP appearance, "He will repeal Obamacare" and said "that he was not embracing any part of the health care reform law known as Obamacare."