The Third of the Three Coverage-Expansion Arrows of ObamaCare: Making People Aware of Their Options
ObamaCare always was supposed to launch three arrows in its effort to increase health-insurance coverage:
- Getting individuals and small groups better options through the exchange-marketplace (and then making people take advantage of those options whether they want to or not),
- Expanding coverage by making more people eligible for Medicaid and by providing subsidies to make exchange-marketplace coverage affordable to those of the working poor and lower middle class who would not qualify for even expanded Medicaid.
- Expanding coverage by getting those currently eligible for Medicaid who had not signed up for it to do so.
Ezra Klein writes up a good catch here. Only I did not think that this third arrow was “unexpected”–I thought it was part of the design:
Ezra Klein: Obamacare is having one huge success nobody knows about:
People are, rightly, upset about all that’s going wrong…. But something unexpected is going very, very right. The background here is that before the rollout of the Affordable Care Act there were a lot of people eligible for Medicaid who simply didn’t know it… with some states as low as 36 percent [of eligible people signing up] and others as high as 81 percent. The publicity around the new health-care law has led a lot of those people to inquire about whether they’re eligible for health insurance–and they’re finding out that they are…. In the red states… 91,000 people have… learned… that they are already eligible…. Of the 70,000 people who’ve enrolled in Medicaid in Washington State, 30,000 were eligible before the new law took effect–they just didn’t know it…
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