Gallup survey: Obama’s health coverage expansion gaining momentum

Photo: Facebook Page of US Pres. Barack Obama

WASHINGTON—A major new survey finds that a growing percentage of Americans gained health insurance as the initial sign-up season for President Barack Obama’s health care law drew to a close last month.

Released Monday, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index measured the share of adults without health insurance. That shrank from 17.1 per cent at the end of last year to 15.6 per cent for the first three months of 2014.

The decline of 1.5 percentage points would translate roughly to more than 3.5 million people gaining coverage. The trend accelerated as the March 31 enrolment deadline loomed.

“The Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as ‘Obamacare,’ appears to be accomplishing its goal of increasing the percentage of Americans with health insurance,” said Gallup’s analysis of the findings.

Gallup interviewed more than 43,500 adults, or more than 40 times the number in a typical national media poll.

Coming a week after the close of the health care law’s first enrolment season, Gallup’s numbers suggest a more modest impact on coverage than statistics cited by the Obama administration.

The administration says 7.1 million have signed up for subsidized private plans through new insurance markets, while 3 million previously uninsured people gained coverage through the law’s Medicaid expansion. Millions more remain potentially eligible for marketplace coverage under various extensions the administration has issued.

Gallup found the biggest insurance gains were among lower-income people and among African-Americans.

Although the proportion of Hispanics without coverage fell by 1.7 percentage points, Latinos remained more likely than any racial or ethnic group to lack access, with 37 per cent uninsured.

Results were based on telephone interviews conducted Jan. 2 -March 31 with a random sample of 43,562 adults 18 and older living in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1 percentage point at the 95 per cent confidence level.

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