Obamacare News Update: New Study Finds Most of Uninsured Live in South and are Destitute
Most Americans who can continue to live without health insurance in the age of Obamacare are poor citizens from the South and Southwest living in Republican led metropolises.
While the New York Times analysis finds that in the Northeast and Midwest the Affordable Care Act has largely resulted in the number of uninsured Americans slipping into single digits, in GOP-politically-dominated-regions like Mississippi things have actually gotten worse.
"This year it's more of a state-specific story," said Ed Coleman, the director of data and analytics at Enroll America, an organization devoted to finding uninsured citizens and people signing them up for insurance. "There was a pronounced drop pretty much everywhere last year, and we don't see that pattern again this time around."
Overall, research finds more than three million people from 19 different states now find themselves stuck in a "Medicaid gap," where they are too destitute to qualify for subsidies needed to enter in new marketplaces and unable to get into government programs because local politicians have decided to turn their backs on the idea of Medicaid expansion.
Overall, GOP leaning states continue to have many more uninsured people than Democratic-leaning ones and the trend shows little signs of changing given the party in control of a particular state or region.
Despite all its shortcomings, research points to Obamacare having a profound effect in the lives of many as more and more people have found ways of becoming insured, many with the aid of largely new assistance programs set up in the areas where the reside.
Recently, a new Georgetown University study found that the overall percentage of children in the U.S. lacking health insurance has significantly dropped, but in states which did not expand Medicaid, like Utah,not much has changed.
"When you see the comparison between the states that did and didn't] expand Medicaid], it's striking," said Jessie Mandle, a child health policy analyst.
More specifically, U.S. Census Bureau data shows the number of children in Utah without health insurance remained at roughly 85,000 last year, keeping the state among the bottom five (Alaska, Arizona, Texas and Nevada) for high rate of uninsured children.
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