Enroll America, the
non-profit, non-partisan organization set up to "maximize the number of Americans who are enrolled in and retain health coverage," has been
working very hard during the past year to do just that—to find out who had enrolled in the first year and who hadn't. Partnering with the data group Civis Analytics, they've complied a pretty good picture (see the above map) of where the uninsured are in this country. This will help them in outreach for the 2014 season, but it also is a great resource for
finding out who's been helped the most.
The biggest winners from the law include people between the ages of 18 and 34; blacks; Hispanics; and people who live in rural areas. The areas with the largest increases in the health insurance rate, for example, include rural Arkansas and Nevada; southern Texas; large swaths of New Mexico, Kentucky and West Virginia; and much of inland California and Oregon.
Each of these trends is going in the opposite direction of larger economic patterns. Young people have fared substantially worse in the job market than older people in recent years. Blacks and Hispanics have fared worse than whites and Asians. Rural areas have fallen further behind larger metropolitan areas.
The map is interactive, and
at the original site you can look at the data for every county in the country. So, while you can look at south Texas and marvel at how much people in that state have been helped, check the county data and find out that almost all of those counties that have seen the biggest drop in the uninsured rate started at a point with well over 30 percent uninsured, and still have uninsured rates from roughly 20 to 25 percent. Had the state accepted the Medicaid expansion, it would probably look more like New Mexico, with uninsured rates for 2014 well below 20 percent.
The Medicaid expansion difference is most starkly portrayed on the map between Kentucky—which expanded—and Tennessee, which did not. Overall, the data shows that states that expanded Medicaid reduced the uninsured rate from 14.9 percent to 9.2 percent, averaged out. In the non-expansion states, the uninsured rate in 2013 averaged 18.2 percent, and has been reduced substantially to 13.8 percent, but these states clearly lag far behind their neighbors. And there's this: the 2013 uninsured rate in solidly Republican counties was 18.5 percent and has dropped to 13.1 percent. In solidly Democratic counties, it started at 12 percent in 2013, and has dropped to 8.8. That's a reflection of existing Medicaid policies, which tend to be more generous in Democratic states and cover more people.
The map above shows who has been helped by Obamacare. This one shows who has not—who is still uninsured.
These candidates for governor can turn their states into good Obamacare stories. Help with your $3.
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Clearly, the deep south remains the nation's problem child. But every Republican state in which Medicaid was not expanded stands out for maintaining the highest percentages of the country's uninsured.
