The uninsured rate continues to drop as a result of the Affordable Care Act, a fact that makes the years-long effort to repeal the law all the more difficult for opponents of the controversial health care overhaul.
A new federal survey conducted in early 2016 pegged the uninsured rate at 8.6 percent, a new historical low. The rate has declined slightly from a year before, when the same survey showed an uninsured rate of 9.1 percent.
In 2010, before the ACA was implemented, the national uninsured rate was 16 percent.
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The dramatic increase in coverage is because of a variety of provisions in the law. A provision that allows children to remain on their parents' insurance until 26 had an immediate effect in 2010, but the greatest boost in coverage came from the federally funded expansion of Medicaid that most states now take part in, as well as the individual insurance marketplace operated through healthcare.gov.
The drop in the uninsured rate, however, is not enough to convince most Obamacare skeptics that the law has been a good thing. Critics still insist that the costs have far outweighed the benefits, and that many of the health plans that people buy through the state exchanges are a rip-off.
There have been plenty of accounts of unsatisfied ACA customers, who complain that being insured has barely made health care more affordable for them because of the high deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs that their plans often require.
Furthermore, critics of the law say the economics of the marketplace doom it to failure. Major insurers, including UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Humana have withdrawn from a number of state marketplaces and have indicated that they may abandon the Obamacare business completely because the risk profile of the customers makes covering them too costly.
The ACA has had the greatest impact on coverage rates for blacks and Hispanics, but the uninsured rate for both of those groups remains much higher than the national average. Thirteen percent of black adults below 65 are uninsured; that figure is 24.5 percent for Hispanics.
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