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1 1 (November 2016)

handle is hein.amenin/aeiaaam0001 and id is 1 raw text is: A Closer Look at Health Insurance Coverage Estimates By Joseph Antos and James C. Capretta November 2016 The main objective of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to increase enrollment in health insurance among those who were previously uninsured. Official estimates from the Census Bureau have consistently overstated the number of people who are uninsured. A major factor in the overestimate is the undercount of people in Medicaid. Also, millions of Americans have been officially uninsured despite their eligibility for public insurance or employer coverage. With the passage of the ACA, fewer than 10 percent of the remaining uninsured do not have a realistic path to securing health insurance. The future of the ACA is now uncertain, but any future policy changes will likely need to provide a sure path to insurance coverage for all Americans as well. How many people are uninsured? That is a remarkably difficult question to answer. Reducing the number of people without health insurance coverage is an important policy goal, but there are various ways to define and measure health insurance status. Consequently, various statistics are reported that give partial and sometimes misleading impressions of our success in promoting health insurance for all Americans. Consider the following. In September 2009, President Barack Obama delivered an address to a joint session of Congress on health care reform in which he said, There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage (Obama 2009). The next day, the Census Bureau reported that 46 million people were uninsured in 2oo8, the most recent year for which data were available (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2009). * President Obama's 2009 address was a statement of his policy goal to provide health insurance to 30 million people. Seven years later, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is being hailed as a success for reducing the number of uninsured to 29 million people in 2015, according to the most recent estimates from the Census Bureau (Barnett and Vornovitsky 2016). * The Census Bureau estimated that there were 48 million uninsured in 2012, but only 42 million in 2013, even though very little changed in terms of policy or the state of the economy during that two-year period. (The main provisions of the ACA did not go into effect until 2014.) * Between 2013 and 2016, Medicaid enrollment increased, and thus the number of uninsured decreased, by 2.8 million people in states that did not expand their Medicaid programs (Gates et al. 2016).

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