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Friday, August 25, 2017

Reports of Obamacare's death are greatly exaggerated: All counties to be covered for 2018

Obamacare has now obtained an insurer for every county in the country, defying Republican claims that the program is collapsing. As reported by The Hill, "At one point or another over the past year, more than 80 counties have been at risk of having no ObamaCare insurer on the exchanges in 2018." On Thursday (Aug. 24), the last "bare" county, in Ohio, was covered by insurer CareSource. Insurance companies have until September 27 to sign contracts, so it is not yet guaranteed there will be no bare counties for 2018.

As you no doubt remember, Chicken Little Republicans have proclaimed the sky to be falling ever since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. We were subject to ridiculous predictions about "death panels," skyrocketing premiums, predictions of no fall in the uninsured, horror stories that weren't, and of course the ever-popular "job killing" meme.

Instead, three years of the ACA (Q4 2013 to Q4 2016) brought the uninsured rate for adults 18-64 down from 20.8% to 13.1% (but an increase to 14.2% in Q2 2017) while unemployment fell from 6.7% in December 2013 to 4.7% in December 2016 (and 4.3% in July 2017). In addition, personal bankruptcies fell from 1.5 million in 2010 to just 771,000 in 2016, according to Consumer Reports.

As the recent increase in the uninsured rate shows, the ACA is still vulnerable to sabotage by the Republicans. Given that the increase occurred disproportionately among younger adults, Gallup speculates that uncertainty about the consequences for disregarding the individual mandate may explain a large amount of the change. There remain several routes for sabotage to take place. At the same time, there is a bipartisan effort in the Senate to stabilize the individual marketplace, potentially with explicit funding for individual subsidies.

Constant vigilance!

h/t David Ayon