There are now 3.5 percentage points fewer uninsured adults in the U.S. ever since the Obamacare mandate to buy health coverage kicked in, a new Gallup poll finds.
The country’s uninsured rate dropped to 13.8 percent in 2014, compared to 17.3 percent the year before. The sharpest reductions were in Arkansas and Kentucky, which have both accepted the law’s offer of expanding Medicaid to more low income residents. The uninsured rate fell by 11.1 percent in Arkansas and 10.6 percent in Kentucky.
Those two states have also embraced running their own insurance marketplaces; Kentucky has had one of the most successful exchanges from the beginning and Arkansas is transitioning to a state-run exchange. Other states with the biggest gains in coverage also expanded Medicaid and ran their own exchanges, including Oregon, Washington and West Virginia.
The Affordable Care Act aims to reduce the country’s uninsured rate by enrolling the poorest people in Medicaid and providing federal subsidies for low and middle income earners to buy private health plans in the online marketplaces.
The polling data confirms warnings by advocates for the law, who said the uninsured wouldn’t gain coverage as readily in the states that reject Medicaid expansion and rely on the federal government to run its marketplace. In the 21 states that both expanded Medicaid and ran their own exchange, the uninsured rate declined by 4.8 percentage points, compared to a 2.7 point decline in the 29 states that taken one or neither of those actions.
One thing that hasn’t changed: States in the east and upper midwest still tend to have the lowest uninsured rates, while uninsured rates remain the highest in the south and west.
No state reported a statistically significant increase in the percentage of uninsured between the two years. The data was collected through daily surveys asking people in all 50 states whether they have insurance coverage.
