Gallup Poll: Younger, unhealthier Americans make up majority of newly insured
The Obama Administration’s strategy to flood the health care exchanges with healthy Americans has backfired.
According to a report* recently released by Gallup, 5% of Americans are newly insured under the terms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA.)
Of that 5%, 2.8% of the newly insured were enrolled via the health care exchanges. Although experts (and the media) are split as to whether this means the PPACA is successful or disastrous policy, the polling data has revealed that of those newly enrolled, the majority of them are young, and less healthy than the average American.
Via Gallup:
One catalyst for the individual healthcare mandate was to bring healthy people who otherwise chose not to have health insurance into the healthcare system using the exchanges. However, as was the case in the previous sample, the newly insured using exchanges in the April-June reporting period are less likely than those in the general population to report being in “very good” or “excellent” health. Thirty-eight percent of those using an exchange for their new policies reported being in very good or excellent health, compared with 50% of the general population.
Overall, the number of uninsured Americans has dropped; ostensibly, this means that more Americans will be able to receive the health care they couldn’t previously afford.
However, with more sick people flooding the system, we don’t yet know how this will affect the ability of all Americans to actually receive the care they’re paying to have access to. The success of the PPACA depends in part on the premium payments of healthy people who aren’t taking advantage of their coverage.
Additionally, 13% of Americans remain uninsured. Gallup’s data suggests that the long term success of the PPACA depends on the ability of the federal government to alter their outreach strategy to convince that 13% to enroll and start paying their premiums.
Considering the fact that only 67% of enrollees have paid their premiums (as of April 15,) it looks like the future of health care in America hinges on the willingness of healthy Americans to purchase–and then ignore–expensive insurance policies they never knew they needed.
*Data based on Gallup Daily tracking interviews with more than 31,000 adults conducted between April 15 and June 17.
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Comments
As I have grown older, its becoming more obvious that whether it was the soviet union or terrorists, that although they were enemies, but they were not the real enemies. Our real enemies are those that use our fears to take our freedoms away and enrich and empower themselves at the expense of us all.
If the Dems’ real aim were to increase the numbers of the insured, they wouldn’t have started out by abolishing the affordable policies that millions of people already had and making the price of replacement policies double — unless, maybe, those people went through the humiliating process of trying to get a “subsidy” (but they’d probably end up with an inferior policy, and maybe still at a higher price).
As many of us know, increasing the numbers of the insured was not the Democrats’ real goal.
Democrats started out by punishing the people who were already being responsible enough to pay for insurance out of their own bank accounts, even if they rarely needed or used medical care. That was a reprehensible thing to do.
What!?! A strategy implemented by Washington DC bureaucrats to micro-manage the largest healthcare economy in the world back-fired?
Given the stellar track-record of Marxist and other centrally managed economic regimes throughout history, who could have possibly foreseen this disaster?
I’m perplexed how this could have happened since we have the SMARTER set of Marxists running things this time.
Nobody is surprised at this news except the kool-aid drinkers. The depths of their naiveté are unfathomable.
unexpectedly!
if only someone could have foreseen this… a person of vision like Ray Charles or Helen Keller.
This seems like a much bigger blow than just the numbers suggest.
The major reason behind Obamacare marketing and the target audience was the “young invincibles” who will pay a lot and not get a lot back. The numbers aren’t strikingly different in the chart above. In fact, that’s the major problem. For their plan to work, they needed the numbers to be skewed toward the higher health tiers.
How they thought these young college-aged or recent graduate folks would event be able to afford the insurance is beyond logical scope but that is another matter.
Oh wow, I just realized this is “self-reported” health status. I’d venture a guess that people with medical problems tend to overestimate their personal health status.
Further, it would make me nervous, even in an anonymous survey to admit poor health considering the motive.
This dataset could actually be unintentionally sugar coating it a bit.
Would you expect at least some people to answer falsely on a poll asking them if they were committing a crime?
Remember, it is a crime now to not have insurance. And yet a majority of people answering this survey confessed to the crime. And this is not a crime that is slowly becoming accepted, like marijuana use, it is a crime for which they are going to get fined by the IRS.
If we did a poll asking how many people had successfully robbed their neighbors, would we expect actual criminals to respond “yes”?