Uninsured Rate Falls To Lowest Since 2008: Gallup

OH No! How can we stop this trend? Elect Republicans. They are clearly against people having health care coverage.

Uninsured Rate Falls To Lowest Since 2008: Gallup

| by By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Posted: 04/07/2014 7:34 am EDT Updated: 04/07/2014 7:59 am EDT



WASHINGTON (AP) — A major new survey finds that a growing percentage of Americans gained health insurance as the initial sign-up season for President Barack Obama's health care law drew to a close last month.

Released Monday, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index measured the share of adults without health insurance. That shrank from 17.1 percent at the end of last year to 15.6 percent for the first three months of 2014.

The decline of 1.5 percentage points would translate roughly to more than 3.5 million people gaining coverage. The trend accelerated as the March 31 enrollment deadline loomed.

"The Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as 'Obamacare,' appears to be accomplishing its goal of increasing the percentage of Americans with health insurance," said Gallup's analysis of the findings.


The survey is important because it combines the quick turnaround of media polls with extensive outreach usually seen in government research. Gallup interviewed more than 43,500 adults, or more than 40 times the number in a typical national media poll.

Coming a week after the close of the health care law's first enrollment season, Gallup's numbers suggest a more modest impact on coverage than statistics cited by the Obama administration.

The administration says 7.1 million have signed up for subsidized private plans through new insurance markets, while 3 million previously uninsured people gained coverage through the law's Medicaid expansion. Millions more remain potentially eligible for marketplace coverage under various extensions the administration has issued.

However, those numbers are not comparable with Gallup's.

The White House figure of 7.1 million insurance exchange sign-ups includes insured people who switched their previous coverage, as well as people who have not paid their first month's premium, and who would therefore still be uninsured.

Also, Gallup is counting just adults, while the administration figures include children as well.

It may take much of the rest of the year to get a true bottom line of the health care law's impact on coverage.

But Gallup's numbers do show an improving trend. The share of Americans without coverage is at its lowest since late 2008, before Obama took office, the survey found.

That's independent validation for the White House, and it also helps calm concerns about the fallout from last fall's wave of insurance cancellations.

Some feared the cancellations of more than 4.7 million policies that didn't measure up to the law's standards would actually swell the ranks of uninsured people. That created huge political problems for Obama, who had promised Americans they could keep their insurance if they liked it.

About half the states authorized extensions belatedly granted by the White House.

Gallup found the biggest insurance gains were among lower-income people and among African-Americans.

Among people with household incomes of less than $36,000 a year, the share of uninsured shrank by 3.2 percentage points from levels at the end of 2013.

African-Americans saw their uninsured rate drop by 3.3 percentage points.

Although the proportion of Hispanics without coverage fell by 1.7 percentage points, Latinos remained more likely than any racial or ethnic group to lack access, with 37 percent uninsured.

Gallup found gains in coverage among all age groups, but not much evidence of a late surge of younger people that the administration had hoped for to help keep premiums in check.

Results were based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 2 -March 31 with a random sample of 43,562 adults 18 and older living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1 percentage point at the 95 percent confidence level.

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GOP Grapples With The Fear That Obamacare May Succeed


In light of Obamacare achieving its goal of 7 million insurance sign-ups, William Kristol’s 1993 memo urging his party to block health care reform at all costs seems prescient. His message was remarkably candid: it’s a “serious political threat to the Republican Party.”

 

It's amazing what can be done when you force people to do something. What do you think Comrade Obama will force us to do next especially now that he's claimed he will bypass the peoples' representatives and just start using his pen and his phone to get things done?

November, 2014 can't come soon enough....

 

I wonder when (if?) the admin will ever issue a breakdown of how many of those supposed 7 million are illegals or folks who lost their previous coverage because of Obamacare? And I wonder why the other 43 million didn't want to sign up? Or why the politicians who passed it made sure they were exempted? Or why the unions traded their endorsement of Obamcare for a promise their membership would be excluded?

 

Roughly 1,800 New Jersey children had their insurance plans cancelled last week due to Obamacare.

April 6, 2014
With the flurry of cancellation notices hitting mailboxes across the Garden State, one parent, Bob Miotla, told the NJ.com news of his son's cancellation made him "extremely angry."

"Without having that safety net, if an illness arises, we will probably take him to the ER,"said Miotla, who is on Medicare and disabled.

Obamacare's new mandated requirements killed New Jersey's low-cost children's insurance coverage plan, FamilyCare Advantage. The plan, offered by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, was designed for children whose parents make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and offered medical, dental, and vision coverage for just $144 a month. The program, which was the first of its kind in the nation, was implemented six years ago and considered a model for others states seeking economical ways to provide quality coverage for kids from working class families.

Yet, since FamilyCare Advantage lacked things like mental health services, Obamacare deemed the children's 1,800 plans illegal and the program shuttered last week.

"This is enormously disappointing, said NJ state Sen. Joseph Vitale (D) who co-sponsored the bill that created the program. "It was $5 for doctor visits, $1 for pharmacy and no deductible or cost sharing."

The Obamacare plan offered by the same insurance provider has a $1,500 minimum deductible. Vitale told NJ.com that most families whose children were covered will be ineligible for taxpayer-funded federal Obamacare subsidies because "they earned too much money."

The 1,800 New Jersey children join the five million other Americans who also had their plans canceled by Obamacare. A new study by the RAND Corporation reportedly finds that nearly one million people whose plans were canceled by Obamacare still remain uninsured, a figure Democrats previously claimed was less than 10,000.

Obamacare remains highly unpopular. The latest Associated Press poll finds that an all-time low 26% of Americans support Obamacare.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Govern...are-Cancels-Insurance-Plans-of-1-800-Children

 

But if you like your plan or your doctor you can keep what you have!
Here's proof:

 

I will be extremely surprised if the administration does just such a thing.

Good question. Perhaps Little Joe can answer that for us. Little Joe?

I don't believe we will EVER hear an answer from those politicians (i.e., Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Weiner, etc.). But in the meantime, perhaps Little Joe can explain why they made sure they were exempted. Little Joe?

I'd like to hear the answer. Little Joe won't provide an answer, but will provide an excuse. OK, Little Joe..... begin your excuse..........NOW:[/quote]

 

No, that's not proof. That's just a lying scumbag parroting his boss's lies.

 

What is that strange taste you appear to have in your mouth? Pretty sure it is sour grapes a few of these folks are tasting.

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And one more time....

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[/quote]
No excuses, just tried to change the topic.

 

I'm already having a good week.

This is for you guys...

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The Right-wing hypocrisy never ends....

The House GOP’s Down-Low, Backhanded Endorsement of Obamacare

Even as they publicly decry the president’s health care law, the moves they’re making behind closed doors reveal they may be resigned to its existence.
It’s not all that often that the lead piece on the Drudge Report attacks Republicans, so it’s worth a little savoring when it happens, and this one is especially delectable. The link was to an AP story reporting that two weeks ago, House Republicans stealthily voted for a measure that changed an aspect of the Affordable Care Act.
What? I know. In other words, Congress amends bill it passed a few years ago. In a normal moral universe, this would scarcely qualify as news. But when we speak of the House of Representatives, we are in the modern Republican Party’s moral universe, and there, the rules are different.
You see, by agreeing to amend Obamacare, Republicans are acknowledging the law’s existence and legitimacy. The only things they’re supposed to be doing with Obamacare are burning copies of it on the Capitol steps and voting to repeal it. But here they’ve done the exact opposite. And what made it even worse was the way they did it. The change was very quietly tucked into a larger bill, the Medicare “doc fix,” which helps payments to doctors who serve Medicare patients keep pace with inflation. Only House majority leadership—the Republicans—can do that. And then, to make matters still worse, the yellow-bellied quislings passed the thing by voice vote, so no one had to be on the record.
The change, by the way, removes deductible caps from certain plans small businesses can offer their employees. This allows the employers, according to the AP, to offer cheaper plans to individuals who also have health savings accounts, which conservatives have been pushing for 15 or 20 years. Only around 30 percent of American businesses offer HSAs, and large employers are more likely to include them than small ones. Hence, the target of opportunity for HSA partisans. So the change accomplished a GOP policy goal. But funny thing: apparently not a single Republican member of the House trumpeted the change or even said a word about it when the vote took place March 27.
It hardly matters what the change was. It could have been that the purchase of armor-piercing bullets was now covered under Obamacare and it wouldn’t help: The fact that Republicans used the ACA as the vehicle with which to make this change was the crime. Oh, did I have a jolly afternoon reading through the comment thread at Free Republic:
“The uniparty at work!”
“Appeasement Weasels.”
“Voice vote.”
“And I’ll say it right now: The Republican Party does not want Obamacare to be repealed and will not support candidates who do. I’d love to have someone come back around November 1, 2016 and show me that this prediction was wrong.”
“The G.O.P. (GAVE OBAMA POWER) is the party that created RomneyCARE/ObamaCARE
and imposed it FOR ALL, FOR ROMNEY, FOREVER.”
“Bastards!”
You get the picture. So do we take away from this?
I think we take away from it that some of these “Freepers,” as they’re called on that site, are on to something. Republicans don’t really want to repeal Obamacare. Or no: they almost certainly want to, but they know they probably can’t. So even while they froth away for the cameras and town-hall meetings, there’s another, smaller, darker part of them that knows the truth, or the likely truth, which is that Hillary Clinton appears likely to be the next president, the Democrats will recapture the Senate in 2016 or vastly increase their majority if they didn’t lose it in 2014, and by the end of the next President Clinton’s first term, Obamacare will be nailed to the floor.
Remember, this happened on March 27: four days before the ACA’s enrollment deadline arrived, and therefore well before anyone knew the number would hit the target of seven million. So they were out there, on Fox and on all those acidic radio shows they do, talking about what a world-historical failure Obamacare was going to prove to be in just a matter of days, while meanwhile, with no one recording the roll call, they were buying shares of it.
This brings to mind some things I’ve read about civil rights and the Dixiecrats. The liberal Northern senators used to chat among themselves in the early and mid-1960s, wondering which of their Southern colleagues really and truly believed the racist pollution that poured out of their mouths. The consensus at the time was that Strom Thurmond really did. Richard Russell. Most of them, however, sorta-kinda believed it but just said it, because they knew that as long as they were 110 percenters on what they called “the n——-r question,” they could get reelected ‘til the end of time provided they weren’t caught with the proverbial live boy or dead girl.
There’s a story in Phil Hart’s biography—Hart, of Michigan, was one of the Senate’s most liberal members, and one of the key movers of the Voting Rights Act—about an encounter he had with Mississippi’s James Eastland. Eastland was as hard-shell as they came. But somehow, he and Hart became friends anyway. And so one day on the Senate floor, after delivering himself of a hideous racial tirade, as he walked back toward his desk, Eastland caught his friend Hart’s eye and winked.
Who knows how much of that kind of winking is taking place on the House floor now? “Hey, Steny, I don’t really mean everything I say ’bout y’all, but old so-and-so from the next district over just gave one helluva stemwinder about health care the other day, and I can’t let myself be out-Obamacared, know’ut I mean?” Oh, of course some Republicans are fire-breathers and diehards. But others seem to understand that if you’re going to try to have actual policy impact in the real world, you have to play ball in the real world. And the real world is Obamacare.
The latter group is probably a minority now. But I’m betting that one day they’ll be the majority, and that that day is going to come sooner than most people think. Maybe even—although they sure won’t admit it—before November.

 

**You didn't cite the blogger whose words you copied!

 

Uninsured rate has fallen to lowest since 2008. You mean since the great economic crash? Really how much of this increase can actually be attributed to Obamacare?

 

Tax em and make some amazing roads, what an infrastructure you enjoy! Did that help grow the most powerful economy on the planet? Against that too? How about tax em and create the worlds most powerful military, like being protected? What evil will our gov spawn next?

 

Could be duck call soup

 

Of course, you'd never do such a thing. Oh, wait.

That looks familiar.