Health insurance shrinking uninsured rate among American adults

health insurance enrollment

A recent survey tracking health care reform success has shown that a positive difference is being made.

Just over two weeks is left to purchase the necessary health insurance plans to comply with the individual mandate requirements of the Affordable Care Act, and while the launch of the exchanges last October were not without tremendous hiccups – to say the least – it looks as though it has turned around and is making meaningful progress in reducing the number of adult Americans who had been uninsured.

The results of a large research study have now been released and have shown that uninsured rates are dropping.

health insurance plans enrollmentThis week, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index was released. It determined that the last three months of 2013 had an uninsured rate of 17.1 percent of adults in the United States. It also found that enough people have purchased health insurance plans that it has brought that figure down to 15.9 percent, since that time. What this means is that another 3 to 4 million people are covered beyond the total from the last quarter of last year.

Gallup also revealed that the number of people without health insurance will continue to drop.

In fact, their prediction is that the health care reform is on track to decrease the uninsured rate below any quarterly level that has been measured since 2008, before the time that President Obama was first elected.

The survey involved the participation of over 28,000 adults across the United States. It was given to a random sample and was conducted throughout the months of January and February of this year. It determined that there was progress made in every major demographic group in terms of becoming insured.

The largest drops in the uninsured rates, according to Gallup, were among the households with a total income of under $36,000 per year. Their rate dropped by 2.8 percent.

Among various ethnic groups, the black community is now covered by health insurance plans at a rate that is 2.6 percent more than it was during the last quarter of 2013. The improvement among Caucasians was 1 percent, while Latinos are a group in which the least progress was made, as their rate of coverage grew by only eight tenths of a percentage point.

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