Nearly two years after Obamacare’s implementation, a new survey found that the number of uninsured Americans decreased to less than 10 percent of the population in the first three months of 2015, which is the lowest level in the survey’s 50-year history.
However, experts say the change could be mostly attributed to the Obama administration’s expansion of Medicaid.
According to the survey from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control, the number of people who were uninsured declined from 36 million in 2014 to 29 million in the first three months of 2015. Among adults between the ages of 18 and 64, the percentage of those who were uninsured dropped from 16.3 percent in 2014 to 13 percent in 2015’s first quarter.
The changes to the rate of uninsured come nearly two years after Obamacare’s implementation, which went into effect October 2013.
While the drop speaks to the mission of the health care law, Ed Haislmaier, a health policy expert, pointed to outside factors that affect the decrease in the number of uninsured Americans.
In an interview with The Daily Signal, Haislmaier, a senior research fellow in health policy at The Heritage Foundation, said that though it’s likely the Obama administration was likely “in the ballpark” for the changes in the number of uninsured, the survey had limitations.
Primarily, the government relied on answers from 26,121 respondents as opposed to an actual count, such as the number of people enrolled in health coverage, data that can be provided by health insurance companies.
“They’re trying to say how many people didn’t have coverage and extrapolate from that,” Haislmaier said.
Most notably, though, the survey failed to address an increase to the Medicaid rolls, which stemmed from Medicaid expansion created under Obamacare.
According to Haislmaier, Medicaid enrollment from January 2014 to March 2015 went from approximately 60.9 million to 71 million.
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