Let this not go unnoticed:
Between December 2013 and March of this year, when the federal government was urging people to enroll, the number of Massachusetts residents signed up for health coverage increased by more than 215,000. If that number holds, the percentage of Massachusetts residents who do not have coverage has dropped to less than 1 percent.
via Latest Look Finds Mass. Near Zero Percent Without Health Insurance | CommonHealth.
Amazing: even in spite of the inexcusable (ongoing) mess of the Connector site, we’ve been whittling away at that uninsured rate for 8 years now. And we’re almost universal.
And it’s not just nominal insurance: It’s preventing premature deaths, particularly in communities of color.
Take a bow, Massachusetts. (Then fix the site.)
Massachusetts has over 99% of its citizens covered with health insurance! That’s impressive. And Obamacare (ACA) is also impressive.
Universal health insurance is completely misunderstood. The goal is not to improve people’s health. And, it’s not to make healthcare cheaper. The goal is to make healthcare affordable for everybody. Here’s what Obamacare really means: If you are a middle class family, and if somebody in your family gets sick, then you can afford to get healthcare. You won’t go bankrupt paying healthcare bills. It’s a huge accomplishment.
Though we have been making progress since the passage of state health reform in 2006, it’s the ACA (Obamacare) that made the difference in Massachusetts. The big spike in coverage is just since 2014.
Prior to the ACA, state premium assistance went to people earning up to 3 times the poverty level (around $35,600 for an individual). Under the ACA, subsidy eligibility is more generous, available up to 4 times the poverty level, or around $47,000 for an individual.
The Massachusetts law also locked out from help people with unaffordable coverage offered by an employer. The federal law provides help to people when their employer’s coverage costs over 9.5% of your income.
The ACA also improved our coverage by requiring no copays for many preventive care services, by lowering the costs of prescriptions for seniors and people with disabilities on Medicare, and by outlawing lifetime and annual caps on benefits.
The ACA also is helping state taxpayers, by providing lots more federal funds for coverage assistance, and new resources for things like public health prevention programs, for our insurance regulators to closely vet proposed premium rate increases, and to move towards more coordinated care based on value.
Even in Massachusetts, the ACA has made a huge difference. These new coverage numbers show part of the story.
Brian Rosman
Health Care For All
Brian, at some point I’d love to see HCFA’s impressions on the progress of the Connector website. Are you privy to those conversations? Are you being briefed? Is HCFA bird-dogging that process at all?
Thinking that IT is the new roosting place of the Big Dig Culture … (sigh)
This news needs to be tempered with the fact that our state threw a lot of people on ‘plans’ without having any idea what they were eligible for because the darn website didn’t work. That means a lot of people are getting the kind of plan right now that they may not be able to get when the website is fixed, etc. How many of those will stay on if it means they’ll have to pay more when things are fixed? That’s the question.