Speaking of the uninsured, I inexplicably failed to blog about the latest Gallup results yesterday. Based on polling that goes through mid-April, Gallup now estimates that about 9-10 million people have gained insurance since Obamacare rolled out last year. If you assume that perhaps a million people lost insurance, that’s a net increase of 8-9 million. Of this, about half gained insurance through the exchanges. The rest gained it through Medicaid and increased participation in employer plans.
I’m not going to try to analyze this number any further. It basically represents good news, since it’s a higher estimate than we’ve seen before, and it also jibes with the recent Rand numbers suggesting a large rise in people covered by employer plans. Apparently the individual mandate is having a bigger impact on this than anybody predicted. However, it’s one data point in a noisy series, and I suspect we still have to wait another month to get a reliable set of numbers from all the polling outfits. By the end of May, unless the various polls are in wild disagreement, I imagine we’ll have a fairly good idea of just how big the impact of Obamacare has been so far.
UPDATE: Sorry, everyone else has been leading with a number of 12 million, so that’s what I used. But the Gallup poll estimates that 4 percent of US adults are newly insured, not 4 percent of the entire country. That’s in the range of 9-10 million. I’ve corrected the text.
Note, however, that this ignores children who are newly insured, either via exchanges or Medicaid. So the real number is probably a bit higher. Maybe in the 10-11 million range? It’s hard to say. There are a lot of different surveys that are all measuring slightly different things, and they’re all working on data that’s still incomplete. That’s why it’s probably wise to wait another month or two before we get too confident in any of these numbers.
