Jonathan Cohn passes along the results of a new study from the Commonwealth Fund which estimates that the ranks of the uninsured have dropped by about 5 percentage points since the start of the Obamacare rollout:
To put that in more concrete terms, there are still a lot of Americans walking around without health insurance today. But there are about 9.5 million fewer of them than there were last fall, almost certainly because so many people have enrolled in the newly expanded Medicaid program or purchased subsidized insurance through the Obamacare marketplaces.
How does that compare to expectations? The Congressional Budget Office predicted that, one year into full implementation, Obamacare would reduce the the number of Americans without insurance by 12 million. That included the young adults who got insurance before 2014, by signing onto their parents’ plans. There’s been some controversy over exactly how many people that is, but the best estimates I’ve seen place it somewhere between 1 and 2.5 million. Add that number to the 9.5 million from the Commonwealth survey, and you’re close or equal to the CBO projections.
So that’s probably a total of around 11 million or so. Nearly all of the estimates now seem to be converging around this number, and given the inherent uncertainty in measuring the uninsured it seem like this is about as good as we’re going to get.
