Something I came across thanks to a tweet by Rich Weinstein yesterday: it turns out that, while Obamacare enrollment is only a smidge off-target, comparatively, the number of people who have
actually paid for coverage is a vastly different thing:
As
The Hill notes, only 8.8 million people have actually paid for their services, "a drop of almost 25 percent compared to the 11.7 million people who were signed up at the beginning of 2015." As the
Kaiser Family Foundation report in the story at the tweet above notes,
Affordability remains a challenge. A recent Kaiser poll
found that the overwhelming reason why people who are uninsured say
they are uncovered is cost – 46% of uninsured, non-elderly adults say
they tried to get coverage but found that it was too expensive. However,
it is difficult to separate lack of affordability from lack of
awareness of financial help that may be available, which could be
addressed through more intensive outreach. For example, going into this
last open enrollment period, another poll found that 82% of uninsured adults had not been contacted in the previous 6 months about the health law.
Ya think? It was always a bad idea to rely on young adults as the fiscal backbone of Obamacare. Such have poor-paying jobs, and careers delayed by minimum wage hikes keeping
young people out of the labor market at near record levels — and thus delaying their advancement to other, better-paying jobs.
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