"Obamacare: Where's The Train Wreck?"
"Obamacare: Where's The Train Wreck?"
"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"
2009 Harvard Study: 45,000 Americans Die Annually For Lack of Health Insurance
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has penned a piece for CNN explaining how President Obama and the new GOP Congress can find common ground on solutions. One of the first things McConnell cites as his evidence that Washington is not working — for economically struggling Americans in particular — is this old canard: “Many faced the reality of losing their health plan after being told they could keep it.”
Meanwhile, Gallup announced this morning that the uninsured rate has dropped over four points since Obamacare went into effect a year ago — and that the uninsured rate, now at 12.9 percent, is at its lowest point since Gallup began to “track the measure daily in 2008.”
Gallup describes its findings this way: “The Affordable Care Act has accomplished one of its goals: increasing the percentage of Americans who have health insurance coverage.”
For the purposes of the current political debate, several findings stand out. Two of the biggest outstanding questions about Obamacare right now concern the fate of health care for lower-income and poor Americans. The Supreme Court is set to hear a challenge to the health law that could gut subsidies to three dozen states on the federal exchange — which could end up yanking health care from millions of lower-income Americans. And while more red states are beginning to opt in to the Medicaid expansion, which could lead to still more doing the same, many continue to hold out against it.
Gallup finds, however, that the health law is having particular success in expanding health care to lower-income Americans: Since it went into effect, the uninsured rate has fallen by 6.9 percentage points among those making less than $36,000. While it’s very likely that a lot of those people are benefiting from the Medicaid expansion, a lot of them are undoubtedly gaining coverage thanks to the subsidies.
Meanwhile, McConnell and other leaders of the incoming GOP Senate majority are openly looking to the Supreme Court to gut Obamacare subsidies as a means to accomplish what Republicans failed to do legislatively and politically.
Whether or not you think the consequences of a SCOTUS decision against the law should weigh on the Justices, the declining insurance rate — among lower income Americans in particular — should theoretically increase pressure on Republicans to think about how they will respond if such a decision does come down (such as a fix or an alternative). Indeed, even some diehard opponents of the law, and some GOP Senators, agree with this. Of course, it’s an open question as to whether this will actually happen in any meaningful sense: One alternative possibility is that Republicans will float the general idea that they’re interested in a fix solely in order to make the consequences of a SCOTUS decision against the law appear less dire.
It’s also an open question whether most Republicans will even acknowledge the steep drop in uninsured in the first place.
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