The number of Americans lacking health insurance—a number that declined yearly under the Affordable Care Act—jumped during the first year of the Trump administration.
The Los Angeles Times reports that while the 1.3 percent increase in uninsured found by the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Indexin its fourth-quarter poll sounds modest, it's the "first time since at least 2008 that the share of adults without insurance increased from the previous year."
At the end of 2017, the report says, 12.2 percent of U.S. adults were uninsured; that's up from 10.9 percent at the end of 2016. According to the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, that translates to 3.2 million Americans losing health coverage in 2017.
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Chief among those being cut out of coverage, according to the poll, are young adults, blacks, Hispanics and low-income Americans (those making under $36,000 a year). While the uninsured rate rose for all demographic groups in 2017 except for those 65 and older, who qualify for Medicare, the uninsured rate among adults aged 18–25 increased by 2.0 points in 2017. That's important, since that's the demographic group that, because of its usually low usage of health care, helps to offset the cost of insuring older and sicker Americans.
The report points to national survey data from the federal government, as well as other sources, that indicate the possibility that more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans gained coverage between 2013 and 2017.
Additional data indicate that not only has the increase in people's access to health care and reduction in the financial pressure faced by the uninsured improved the situation for poorer households, but in two states that expanded Medicare, low-income patients with chronic illnesses are much more likely to get medical help.
But despite the study on the improved status of those patients in Arkansas and Kentucky, Republicans and many in the Trump administration dismiss those gains as "meaningless," says the report. Instead, the administration resorted to a number of actions to cut the reach and effectiveness of the ACA when its efforts to repeal it outright failed. Cut budgets for advertising outreach and multiple attempts to discredit the law's benefits—as well as cutting subsidies to insurers, which helped to destabilize the insurance marketplaces—took a toll on enrollment.
While specific effects can't be quantified, these actions apparently did weigh on consumers, since the Gallup-Sharecare survey identifies a decline in the percentage of adults who bought insurance on their own, instead of getting it from an employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid.
Additional actions to weaken the ACA by the administration have led the Gallup-Sharecare report to say, "It seems likely that the uninsured rate will rise further in the years ahead."
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