Medicaid expansion accounts for the vast majority of new health insurance enrollment under Obamacare, a new report by the conservative Heritage Foundation has concluded.
The think tank crunched numbers derived from insurer regulatory filings and other sources and determined that, out of the 8.5 million people who gained health insurance coverage in the first half of this year, Medicaid expansion for working-age adults comprised 71 percent of them.
Recommended Stories
“The inescapable conclusion is that, at least when it comes to covering the uninsured, Obamacare so far is mainly a simple expansion of Medicaid,” Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Edmund Haislmaier and health economist Drew Gonshorowski wrote in the report.
According to the White House, 8 million people signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, and 3 million were enrolled in Medicaid and the federal children’s health insurance program as of February.
The Heritage report found that even though 8 million signed up for private insurance, only 6.3 million enrolled by following through with payments.
The healthcare law expanded Medicaid coverage for adults under 65 who earn less than 133 percent of the poverty level, but only half of the states are participating because federal funding of the program is set to decrease over time.
Critics of the healthcare law have suggested too few people will sign up as premium-paying insurance customers to fund the program without additional taxpayer help.
The Heritage data showed that individual insurance market enrollment grew substantially in the first half of 2014, with nearly 6.3 million people signing up during the first six months of the year.
Heritage warned, however, that the net number of new sign-ups is actually far lower due to the “substitution effect,” meaning individuals who signed up already had previous coverage from an employer or through an individual plan.
Haislmaier and Gonshorowski said the new sign-ups in the individual insurance market must be offset by 3.8 million people who joined after losing their employer-sponsored insurance
Private insurance coverage, they concluded, increased by less than 2.5 million plans during the first half of 2014.
During the same period of time, Medicaid enrollment expanded by a total of 6.1 million, the report concluded. Much of the Medicaid coverage increases occurred in the 25 states that agreed to expand the program under the new healthcare law.
