The U.S. uninsured rate has dipped below 9 percent for the first time ever, several years into President Obama’s healthcare law that extended health coverage to millions of Americans.
The data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a bright spot of news for the Obama administration, which has lately been doing damage control thanks to insurers hiking rates in the insurance marketplaces or withdrawing due to heavy losses.
“Our country’s march toward improving access, quality and affordability in healthcare goes on, and today’s numbers show that the Affordable Care Act is continuing to drive historic progress,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said in a statement.
Under the law’s Medicaid expansion and marketplaces where federal subsidies are available, an estimated 20 million people have gotten health coverage, many of them for the first time.
The new coverage opportunities have caused the uninsured rate to dip dramatically, although not as much as was originally projected by the Congressional Budget Office. The uninsured rate is now down to 8.6 percent, from 14.4 percent in 2013, according to data from the CDC.
