Obamacare is probably the best we can do in a country run by the super rich and corporations-- in this case the insurance industry and big pharma. That progressive politicians have been trying to get some sort of national healthcare for decades and Obamacare, with its numerous defects, was probably the only possible compromise shows what an utterly backward country this is. So much for American "exceptionalism" the politicians of both parties pay lip service to.
FROM WASHINGTON POST
Obamacare leaves millions uninsured. Here’s who they are.
Welcome to Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff’s regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system — and being changed by it. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and read previous columns here.
When we talk about the Affordable Care Act, we mostly focus on the millions of Americans who will gain health insurance coverage. We talk less about the millions who will remain uninsured.
And there are a lot of them: 30 million Americans will not have coverage under Obamacare, according to a new analysis in the journal Health Affairs.
"Even if the law were fully implemented, there would have been 26 million uninsured people," co-author Steffie Woolhandler said in an interview Thursday. "This isn't just about the Medicaid expansion. This is the system as originally designed."
Thirty million is a lot smaller than the 48.6 million Americans who lack insurance coverage right now. It's also, as Woolhandler points out, not exactly breaking news: The Congressional Budget Office estimated over a year ago that between 26 million and 27 million Americans would not have insurance under the expansion.
Woolhandler and her colleagues have done one of the most in-depth analyses of the uninsured under Obamacare that I've seen. They look at who will be uninsured in 2016, a few years after the health law's insurance expansion takes place. You can expect these numbers to change (likely to shrink) in later years, as budget forecasters expect enrollment in health law programs to grow gradually.
One of the most surprising findings, perhaps, is that the vast majority of the uninsured under Obamacare -- 80 percent -- will be U.S. citizens. This is true in the two scenarios that the researchers looked at, one in which states on the fence about the Medicaid expansion opt-in and one in which those states opt out. As you can see, there's not much of a difference.
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