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Saturday, March 8, 2014

Hawaii Cuts Uninsured Population in Half

In case you haven't seen Charles Gaba's great website ACAsignups.net, you really need to see it. It is the best source available for tracking Obamacare enrollments, covering all categories of signups, including Medicaid, the federal and state exchanges, off-exchange signups, and estimated under-26ers.

One of the most notable achievements of Obamacare is in the President's birthplace, Hawaii, where the number of uninsured people has already fallen by more than half, despite having a horrible website for the state-run exchange. The biggest chunk of this is through Medicaid enrollments, both people newly eligible and those previously eligible who had not signed up ("woodworkers," people who've come out of the woodwork). Here are the totals:

Uninsured: 102,000
Medicaid: 48,000
Exchange: 4,661
Off-exchange: 4,000

Total newly insured: 56,661, or 55.6%.

Moreover, approximately 10,000 Hawaii residents are ineligible for Medicaid or ACA subsidies due to their immigration status, so the state is doing very well indeed.

For those of you who haven't seen it, below is Gaba's pride and joy, "The Graph." It's the best visual interpretation we have of how signups have proceeded since the rollout of Obamacare October 1. Note that we can expect a big last-minute rush over the final weeks of open enrollment, so we will see soon just how well the first year's signups have gone.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Source: ACAsignups.net

The Graph










2 comments:

  1. The failure of dems to be objective on ACA has been very disappointing.
    Just a smidgen:

    http://www.correntewire.com/obamacare_clusterfuck


    http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/06

    IMO ACA is the law and it has destroyed the what was left of the Obama and dem brands, could it be that was not an accident and would not the smartest people in the room be able to predict that?
    By maintaining 18% of GDP misdirected to the HC sector,ACA preserves the mind-boggling extraction of wealth. No problem can be solved if it is set up (and solved) in the wrong units. All else is tantamount to misdirection and sophistry. The constraints – the first order units - to the problem are two:

    1) percentage of gdp; and
    2) 100% of the population covered with equivalent care.

    Set the constraints and solve the problem. This is what in essence all the other developed countries do.



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  2. There is no doubt that single payer would be better. Getting rid of the private insurance companies, which have much higher administrative and profit overhead than Medicare and Medicaid, would be a good thing.

    At the same time, systems like Obamacare have been shown to work in Europe and Massachusetts, and it is a big improvement over the status quo ante. We still have a long way to go, obviously.

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