The latest Republican rap on Obamacare, since they can't deny that millions of people have gained insurance because of it, is that
it doesn't count because it's not "real" coverage because it's mostly Medicaid and doesn't actually provide health care. Well, guess what. Republicans are
wrong on Obamacare, again.
Obamacare improved key health-care measurements for millions of Americans, reversing a troubling trend, a new study strongly suggests. The study found marked gains in the number of people with insurance—as other research has repeatedly confirmed—as well as improved access to doctors and medications, affordable health care and good health status after implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
But the research published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association also noted that the the gains in health coverage and access to care for low-income adults were particularly striking in states that expanded their Medicaid programs under the ACA to include more poor people.
The researchers
looked at three years of Gallup survey raw data to come to these conclusions. Gallup has been doing quarterly surveys on health coverage since 2008, so it has an established methodology with consistent questioning that allows for researchers to be confident in the trendlines in the surveys, and in this case the trendlines point to increased health care to go along with the increased insurance. That is particularly true in the Medicaid expansion state, the
researchers say.
States that expanded Medicaid saw the uninsured rate among low-income adults drop by 5.2 percentage points more than non-expansion states, according to the study. Expansion states had drop in the number of such adults who had no personal doctor that was 1.8 percentage points better than non-expansion state, and 2.2 percentage points greater than non-expansion states when measuring the number of low-income earners who had no easy access to medicine.
The only area of health self-reporting that didn't show statistical improvement was the number of days spent ill, but even a trend that had been moving downward stopped getting worse when the law kicked in. There was a 5.5 percentage point drop in people reporting that they couldn't afford care. There was a 3.4 percentage point drop of people reporting they were in poor health. This, combined with large decreases in the uninsured rate for minorities leads the authors to conclude "that the ACA may be associated with reductions in long-term disparities in access to care, one of the goals of the ACA." So, yeah, it seems to be working, and would work even better if every state expanded Medicaid.