More than 7 million people gained health insurance in 2015, according to a brand new report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which sets a record.
During the fourth quarter of last year, just 9.1 percent of U.S. residents, or 28.6 million people, had no health coverage, the National Health Interview Survey found. That’s a decline of 2.4 percentage points and 7.4 million people from a year before.
The additional 7.4 million insured builds on the 8.8 million previously uninsured people who got covered in 2014, the first year of the Affordable Care Act’s full benefits. […]
The CDC data demonstrate that 16.2 million fewer people were uninsured during the fourth quarter of 2015 than at the end of 2013.
A previous estimate from the Department of Health and Human Services puts the total number of newly covered people higher, at 20 million. This year, Gallup reports the uninsured rate continued to fall, even though the pollster’s findings show a greater share of people without coverage than the CDC’s data.
This is, to quote Vice President Biden, a big fucking deal.
For the first time since the nation has kept records on the uninsured rate, it's in the single digits. But you still see Republicans like John McCain campaigning on their failure to repeal it.
Republicans continue to talk about killing it down to the roots, and they continue to not have any kind of a proposal to replace it. In Republican states they’re still so irrationally opposed to it they’re turning down millions of dollars in Medicaid expansion funding, and million of people remain uninsured because of that. Let’s help make 2016 the year Obamacare repeal finally dies.
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