More Good News: Obamacare Has Not Overwhelmed the Health Care System

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Obamacare has provided health insurance to millions of people who previously lacked it. And yet, doctors’ offices aren’t jammed, as some people feared. Sarah Kliff takes a look at why this is, and I think this is the key point:

Federal data released earlier this month shows that the uninsured rate has fallen 35 percent since the coverage expansion began in 2014….In that way, the health law’s insurance expansion was big. But put another way, it’s also small: 14 million people gaining coverage in a country of more than 300 million residents is kind of a drop in the bucket. We’re talking about 4 percent of the country going from uninsured to covered.

And it’s not just that. Of that 4 percent, a lot of them were healthy people who simply didn’t have much need for medical attention but were forced by the Obamacare mandate to purchase insurance anyway. So they got insurance, but since they were healthy, they still didn’t go in to see their new doctors much. In reality, I suspect that the number of new patients with real medical needs probably amounted to 2-3 percent of the population. That’s an extra burden on the health system, but not a huge one.

Medicare turned out to be similar when it began in 1965. As Kliff says, “In practice, these programs are relatively small: each only insured a small chunk of the population. Even though they’re remaking American health care, they’re doing so in a small, slow progression. That helps explain why none of these coverage expansions have overwhelmed doctors, despite our expectations.”

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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