The Obama administration has repeatedly inferred that most people are fully subsidized under Obamacareand the big 2017 rate increases therefore don’t matter:
“Headline rate increases do not reflect what consumers actually pay,” Kathryn Martin, HHS’s acting assistant secretary for planning and evaluation, said in a statement. “Even in a scenario where all plans saw double-digit rate increases, the vast majority of consumers would continue to have affordable options.”
To be as precise as they are careful to be, they correctly claim that 85% of those buying on the exchanges are subsidized. But they also never mention that half the people who buy Obamcare individual health insurance–on and off the exchanges–don’t get a subsidy and take the full whack from all of the big rate increases and even higher deductibles. The middle class seems to be invisible to them.
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The best measurement of people who lack health insurance, the National Health Interview Survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has released early estimates of health insurance for all fifty states and the District of Columbia in the first quarter of 2016. There are three things to note.
First: 70.2 percent of residents, age 18 to through 64, had “private health insurance” (at the time of the interview) in the first quarter of this year, which is which is the same rate as persisted until 2006. Obamacare has not achieved a breakthrough in coverage. It has just restored us to where we were a decade ago. Further, the contribution of Obamacare’s exchanges to this is almost trivial, covering only four million people.
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