More than six years after the passage of President Obama’s signature health care law purported to expand health coverage to all, nearly 21 percent of low-income Americans are still living without health insurance.
According to a new quarterly poll out from Gallup,10.9 percent of American adults still lacked health coverage at the end of 2016, a trend that remained fairly steady over the latter half of last year. In fact, despite the president’s controversial and heavy-handed health care law, the uninsured rate has dropped less than five percentage points since midway through 2008, when 15.4 percent of American adults were uninsured.
Interestingly, a large number of low-income Americans still lack coverage, despite being one of the president’s targeted populations. Gallup notes that while the number of uninsured Americans who earn less than $36,000 per year has dropped by about ten percentage points since Obamacare exchanges first opened in 2013, a full 20.8 percent of them still don’t have health insurance, despite state Medicaid expansions, Obamacare’s health insurance mandate and massive federal subsidies offered on government-run exchanges. Many low-income Americans who have recently signed up for health coverage have done so under Medicaid, which has ballooned by about 15 million new enrollees in the last three years.
Likewise, more than 27 percent of Hispanics still aren’t covered.
“While uninsured rates among both groups have declined by about 10 percentage points between the fourth quarters of 2013 and 2016, they maintain the highest uninsured rates of all major demographic groups,” Gallup noted.
The polling organization also noted that those who are responsible for entirely self-funding their own health coverage (i.e., those who aren’t under an employer-sponsored plan) have seen the largest change, rising 3.7 percentage points to 21.3 percent of the total population. This is likely due to individuals purchasing health care on state and federal exchanges under threat of Obamacare’s individual mandate penalty, which currently sits at a yearly fee of $625 per adult and $347.50 per child, or 2.5 percent of your household income (whichever is higher).
For the poll, Gallup surveyed nearly 43,000 adults living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The agency noted their poll has a margin of error of +/- 1 percentage point at a 95 percent confidence level.
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