Multiple Reports: Number of Uninsured To Rise Under Obamacare
Not just because of skyrocketing premiums due to all of the federal mandates and taxes, but because most those who will enroll in any existing health care exchanges will be from those who were previously insured by their employer. Employers are being forced to dump health coverage for employees because Obamacare rules and costs discourage employers from insuring their employees.
National Center for Policy Analysis:
It is cruelly ironic, but the massive law that was enacted to solve the problem of the uninsured in America is more likely to worsen it. This would be true even if the program is perfectly implemented and all the provisions come online on time and within budget.
How could this be? It is a multistep process. Stay with me for a second.
First, the simplest and most direct form of expanding coverage — Medicaid expansion — is likely to have very little effect. I’m not talking here of the states that refuse to do it after the Supreme Court made it optional, but of the entire program.
Remember that one-third of the uninsured have always been eligible for Medicaid and/or SCHIP coverage but don’t bother to sign up. Actually, it is worse than that. A few years ago, William Sommers wrote in Health Affairs that one-third of all uninsured children had been enrolled in Medicaid or SCHIP within the previous year but their parents found so little of value that they didn’t bother to re-enroll them.
Nothing about ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is likely to change this dynamic. Yes, there will be more advertising, and yes a larger number of people will be eligible, but quite of a few of those newly eligible people are already getting coverage on the job, so any expansion of enrollment is likely to be a crowd-out of private insurance. One of ObamaCare’s architects, Jonathan Gruber, has done extensive research on this subject and concluded that as much as 60% of the enrollment in expanded public programs is from people who had been privately insured. No doubt this effect grows bigger the higher up the income scale you go.
By the way, a recent example of this crowd-out phenomenon is revealed in a new study by the Robert Wood Johnson-funded State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC). Much has been made of the numbers of adult “children” covered under ObamaCare’s mandate allowing people up to age 26 to stay on their parent’s policies. This study shows that the number of such people covered as dependents on employer plans rose from 30.2% of the population group in 2009 to 36.5% in 2011. Sounds like a great success until you realize that the percentage of that age group that had employer coverage in their own names dropped from 21.8% in 2009 to 16.5% in 2011. So, virtually all of the people now covered as dependents were previously covered on their own.
Less studied is the stark reality that many of the people who might be eligible for Medicaid are simply too dysfunctional to enroll. They might be functionally illiterate, drug addicted, mentally ill, outlaws, or in the underground economy and not want to bring attention to themselves. They can’t understand an insurance contract or make and keep appointments for services, but they know where the doctors are 24/7 — the hospital emergency department. When these people have a health problem they don’t need insurance coverage. They need direct care.
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