My must read of the day is "Obamacare working? Uninsured rate lowest in years, poll finds," by CBS News.
In what may be a sign that the central aim of the Affordable Care Act is working, a new Gallup survey finds that the percentage of Americans without health insurance is on track to reach its lowest quarterly rate since 2008.
The uninsured rate has fallen to 15.9 percent, Gallup reports, after conducting 28,000 interviews with Americans from Jan. 2-Feb. 28. By comparison, the uninsured rate in the fourth quarter of 2013 was 17.1 percent. If accurate, that translates to a difference of about 2.5 million adult Americans. The survey's margin of error was one percent.
The survey shows that the uninsured rate has dropped for almost every major demographic group so far this year. The rate has fallen the most—2.8 percent, to 27.9 percent—among uninsured Americans with an annual household income of less than $36,000 a year. Hispanics remain the subgroup most likely to be uninsured, at the rate of 37.9 percent.
This goes back to what I constantly argue when it comes to Obamacare data: there is not enough information to draw a conclusion.
In a study released yesterday, Gallup found that the uninsured rate was 15.9, down from last quarter’s 17.1 percent. That would equal a reduction of 1.2 percent—keep in mind, the margin of error is 1 percent.
The survey notes that the decline "could be a result of the ACA," and that's what the CBS report is suggesting as well. That seems like a leap because there’s no information in this survey to say whether these people have insurance because of Obamacare.
The survey then broke down those with insurance into types of primary health coverage:
The majority of individuals still have insurance through their employers. Since the employer based market won’t be in full swing until at least 2015, we can’t ascertain if this percentage is due to the law. And Medicare doesn’t really count. Benefits, copays, etc. may have changed because of the Affordable Care Act, but there were no major structural changes to Medicare.
The numbers that could best measure the success of the ACA, right now, in providing the uninsured with coverage is Medicaid and those in the individual market, but again, there’s not enough information.
With the individual market, don’t we want to know how many people are signing up through the marketplace? So much money was spent on Healthcare.gov and navigators in order to help the uninsured sign up through the exchanges—part of the enrollment success depends on how people get their insurance.
Two surveys released last week found that "the new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance."
The survey by McKinsey & Co found that only one in 10 "people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month." That number did not include anyone who qualified for Medicaid.
On Medicaid Gallup notes, "The percentage who say they are covered primarily through Medicaid is also up slightly, likely because some states have chosen to expand Medicaid coverage."
But there’s no way to know if those who have now signed up in Medicaid were insured because of Obamacare.
Remember, the Medicaid expansion created two groups, "traditionally eligible" and "newly eligible." The ones in the "newly eligible" group are the ones that did not previously qualify. States will be reimbursed 100 percent of the newly eligible costs for the first three years by the federal government
If you’re going to accurately count a Medicaid enrollment as the result of the healthcare legislation, the enrollee has to fall into that newly insured group. Problem is, we won’t have that data until states file for reimbursement, and they won’t do that until the end of March (Sarah Kliff explains this really well here).
This Gallup poll presents an incomplete picture, and it does not contain important pieces of information.