The Affordable Care Act has significantly reduced the number of low-income Americans going without health insurance, according to new federal data examining the first full year that the health law extended coverage to millions of people.
Previous studies have suggested that, thanks to Obamacare, the national uninsurance rate has dropped to record lows. But the National Health Interview Survey, which is conducted by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, delivers perhaps the most trusted data on the country’s recent health policy changes. This particular survey has been administered for more than five decades and is held up as a gold standard among researchers in the field.
The National Health Interview Survey concluded that, among U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 64, “for every poverty status group, a significant decrease was seen in the percentage who were uninsured between 2013 and 2014.” During that time period, which marked the beginning of Obamacare’s major coverage expansion, the uninsurance rate for Americans defined as “poor” and “near-poor” both saw sharp drops of at least seven percentage points:
Americans who are not considered poor — in other words, families of four living on an income greater than $47,700 — saw a much smaller gain. Among that group, the unsinurance rate declined about 2.5 percentage points.
The divide in the data reflects the fact that the Affordable Care Act was specifically designed to extend coverage to struggling people who were previously locked out of the insurance market. Previous enrollment data has suggested the law is successfully narrowing the gaps among the demographic groups that have historically struggled to access health care, like African Americans, low-income people, and women.
Before health care reform, poor Americans were more likely to lack coverage to begin with — so it makes sense that they’ve had more to gain from Obamacare, which extends financial assistance to help people either enroll in public insurance or purchase a plan on new state-level marketplaces. If every state had agreed to expand Medicaid, a major tenet of Obamacare that was ruled optional by the Supreme Court in 2012, health experts say that low-income Americans’ advances would have been even more pronounced.
The latest data from the National Health Interview Survey was released just days before the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in on another major policy included in the health law.
If the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell are successful, the government will no longer be allowed to offer tax subsidies to help Americans purchase insurance in 34 states across the country. That outcome would suddenly render millions of people unable to afford to the cost of their plans, sending the insurance market into chaos and undoing much of the progress that Obamacare has accomplished so far. Recent surveys have found that the vast majority of Americans on both sides of the political aisle do not want the justices to eliminate those subsidies.