A new report put out by the Department of Health and Human Services on the effects of the Affordable Care Act shows that the benefits of Obamacare are cutting across all major demographic groups. More white Americans received coverage since October 2013 — when the law’s coverage provisions began to come into effect — than black and Latino Americans combined. However, the rate of uninsured is dropping by a greater percentage among minority groups than the white population.
According to the report, released Tuesday, some 7.4 million white Americans received coverage — under provisions including Medicaid, the Health Insurance Marketplace, and individual market coverage — while 4 million Hispanics and 2.6 black Americans gained coverage in that period.
As a result the uninsured rate among white Americans dropped from 14.3 percent to 8.3 percent, for a net decrease of 6 percentage points. Proportionally speaking, the drop in the uninsured rate was even greater among minorities. For Hispanics, the rate of uninsured dropped from 41.8 percent to 30.3 percent — a net decrease of 11.5 percentage points — while black Americans saw a net decrease in their uninsured rate of 10.3 percentage points, dropping from 22.4 percent to 12.1 percent.
Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell unveiled the new numbers — which come ahead of the third open enrollment period beginning Nov. 1 — at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.
“Until we know all Americans have a chance to find affordable coverage, quality care, and the tools to make the best decisions for their health, we will struggle as a nation to move forward,” she said in her remarks.
There are more whites than blacks and hispanics.
This article is just silly, without per-capita statistics.
Huh? Whites are roughly three-quarters of the U.S. population, so of course more of them have been able to get insurance. What matters is what proportion of each racial/ethnic group has gotten coverage, not absolute numbers.
You say that “Proportionally speaking, the drop in the uninsured rate was even greater among minorities.” So this sounds to me like a good-news story.
One thing I think the article points out is that a lot of whites already had other insurance but have switch to coverage through obamacare, whereas a lot of minorities didn’t have any before. My work switched from BCBS to Unitedhealthcare because BCBS pushed their rates so high when Ocare first came out. A lot of folks were pissed and blamed Ocare but the cost of the new UHC was actually lower than the old BCBS so I kind of thought they were just showing their hate for anything Obama more than their dislike of one insurance co. vs another.
It’s actually better than the stats suggest, because millions of people who were formerly insured had so-called “junk” policies that covered very little. Most of those are now illegal, so those people have gone from theoretically insured to actually insured.
Wait, I thought the Tea Partiers, et al., were mad at Obamacare because it benefitted only “those” people…