The Census report on Health Insurance Coverage in the United States shows the number of uninsured jumped from 8.0 percent in 2017 to 8.5 percent in 2018 then again to 9.1% as of March 2019.
2018 vs 2017 Healthcare Insurance
Age Factor
Key Points
- For children, coverage overall decreased by 0.6 percentage points (to 94.5 percent), and public coverage declined by 1.3 percentage points (to 35.7 percent). The latter change was likely due to a 1.2 percentage-point decrease in Medicaid and CHIP coverage.
- In 2018, people in households with lower income had lower health insurance coverage rates than people in households with higher income.
- In 2018, 86.2 percent of people in households with an annual income of less than $25,000 had health insurance coverage, compared with 96.8 percent of people in households with income of $150,000 or more.
The above bullet points are from the article.
Age Group 19-25
Obamacare forced this age group to overpay.
Millennials are bright enough to figure this out and some are willing to take the risk of no insurance.
Age Group 45-64
The uninsured in age group 45-64 are probably scared to death and praying they can make it until then. Those opting out do so for cost reasons.
Age Group 65+
Medicare is an easy choice, so this group is insured.
Some Blame Trump
Politico notes Number of uninsured Americans rises for the first time since Obamacare.
“Prior to the Trump administration assuming office, reducing the number of uninsured children was a national success story,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the group, which has supported the ACA and other coverage programs. “Unless things change immediately, this progress is at risk – and our children and their families will pay the price.”
“President Trump’s cruel health care sabotage has left two million more people without health insurance, forced to live in constant fear of an accident or injury that could spell financial ruin for their families,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.
Middle Class Squeeze
It’s easy to blame Trump for everything, so many do. It goes with the territory.
Republican policies are responsible for some of the increase. But what percentage?
Brian Blase, a former White House official who helped steer the administration’s efforts to expand cheaper health insurance plans, pointed out the Census found a statistically significant increase in the uninsured rate for people earning more than 400 percent of the federal poverty line. That is the eligibility cutoff for for Obamacare subsidies for those purchasing their own coverage in the law’s marketplaces. The finding speaks to the trouble middle-class families face in affording Obamacare plans, Blase said.
“People above 400 percent of the poverty line, premiums are really expensive for them,” he said.
The statistics support multiple reasons, especially Republican states, not Trump alone.
Too Expensive
Some comments the Wall Street Journal on the Rising Number of Uninsured support the “too expensive” thesis.
“As the economy continues to slowly improve, people’s incomes were maybe going up a bit and that was enough to pull them out of Medicaid but not enough for job-based coverage,” said Rachel Garfield, a vice president at the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.
“It’s just too expensive,” said Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a public-policy free-market research organization. “People are siphoning themselves off.”
Medicaid Expansion
- The uninsured rate in 2018 rose by 0.6 percentage point in states that expanded Medicaid, to 3.5%, for people living at or above 400% of poverty, or about $80,000 for a family of three, according to the census data.
- It rose 1.7 percentage points to 6.2% in states that didn’t expand Medicaid for this group.
The uninsured rate was up across the board, but more so for states that did not expand Medicaid.
Ultimately, states are responsible for decisions on expanding Medicaid and some Republican-led states did just that.
Medicaid expansion is ultimately a state decision, not a Trump decision.
Screwed Generation
I cannot help returning to this key stat: “Among adults aged 19 to 64, the youngest group, up to age 25, was among the most likely to be uninsured, according to the census data. That demographic had an uninsured rate of 14.3%.”
That’s the screwed generation.
Obamacare forced the healthy young to overpay.
By design, Obamacare forced the young and healthy to subsidize the obese, the smokers, and the terminally ill.
14.3% of them said screw it. And who can blame them?
So much for forced risk sharing.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I’m an American and I’ll be moving from South Korea to the USA in October. I’ve spent 7 of the last 13 years in Korea and health insurance is always the best thing about living in South Korea and the worst thing about living in the USA. I pay around $100 a month for national health insurance, there are no deductibles and no annual deductibles, there are no pre-existing conditions, it’s accepted at all clinics and hospitals, and the national health insurance never tries to weasel out of covering surgeries or anything. It’s non-profit and amazing. Now I have to go back to the corrupt American insurance where the deductibles are so high things rarely get covered, one insurance company tried to refuse to cover a trip to the ENT specialist because they said a vasectomy was a pre-existing condition, some doctors and clinics don’t accept some patients with some insurances, and if I’m in an emergency situation, I may have to decide whether to go to the ER of a hospital that doesn’t accept my insurance or roll the dice and drive a longer distance to one that does accept my insurance. When I was in the general ward for three nights in South Korea (fully covered by national health insurance) there was another patient there, a South Korean citizen, who had flown from Atlanta to have a non-emergency operation. My appendectomy cost around $300 since I had insurance. If I wouldn’t have had insurance, it would’ve cost around $1,200. It’s unreal how corrupt the USA is, especially hospitals and insurance companies. If that’s the best the “Bible Belt” can do, it doesn’t say much for the deities in the Abrahamic religions.
Congress approved tax exemptions for employer-paid health care benefits in the 50’s. Six decades later a full third of “the system” is full-retard socialism (Medicare + Medicaid + VA = 34%). At this point no one can imagine let alone remember what a free market in medical care and true insurance looks like. Every fix offered is a new set of regulations, and leaves less room for the individual’s full liberty to dispose of his or her own property.
The individual is rarely even mentioned today. Notice all of the statism-zombies even on this site who can tell us about the AGGREGATE medical expenses for different countries, but are completely silent on the issues of individual sovereignty and property rights. Spoiler: they do not think about nor value the individual. At all. I presume it’s because the requisite brain cells have withered and died through decades of neglect and abuse.
You think that property rights and individual sovereignty trump a healthy population? If you think you have a right to go bankrupt as a result of a medical condition is bizarre. You cannot afford a comprehensive medical plan for yourself, whose brain has withered and died?
He is highly unlikely to die from a “comprehensive” disease. It’s a rather uncommon cause of death. All he needs to do, is be able to pay for the services he may need. Or want. No different from any other, unpredictable, area of life.
Focus on removing every roadblock preventing each and every one of those individual services to be rendered as cheaply as humanly possible, and you’ll have a system as efficient at dealing with it “comprehensively” as efficiently as possible given currently available resources.
“You think that property rights and individual sovereignty trump a healthy population?”
Freedom trumps everything. It is, as Acton put it, “not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.”
With that freedom, comes the freedom to arrange your affairs such that you feel you get the best health care you can obtain, given present resources. Or, you can choose to prioritize differently, and instead spend your resources on blow, so you can croak under a bridge.
Freedom from responsibility is also freedom. The ER is not a form of healthcare that works because it is not cost effective and those who cant be made to be responsible put burdens on everyone else. Does freedom also mean open borders ? This is after all ultimate personal freedom for all.
Freedom does include the freedom of anyone who wishes to, to set up shop as an ER facility. Where they have the freedom to treat, or not, whomever they darned well feel like.
In my view freedom from the fear of bankruptcy as a result of one medical condition has to be weighed against other freedoms. I suspect that having your legs amputated because you can’t afford your diabetes medicines is not much of a freedom.
“In my view freedom from the fear of bankruptcy as a result of one medical condition has to be weighed against other freedoms.”
What happens when the country is bankrupted and the whole system collapses?
What is it about cutting your health costs in half don’t you understand?
“In my view freedom from the fear of bankruptcy…”
That’s not what the word “freedom” means. It’s a concept in political philosophy. The desire to be “free” from reality, from the fact that disease exists, is a fantasy, not freedom. … A free people create wealth and voluntary economic arrangements to minimize the risks and effects of calamity. Welfare statists rather think of how best to point government guns at other people, on the wishful thinking that if there’s enough guns and if they’re pointed just right then we’ll approach a problem-free utopia.
Read the Theory Of Moral Sentiments, you mostly sprout juvenile crap.
Then you are free to help out whomever you feel like helping out of bankruptcy.
“You think that property rights and individual sovereignty trump a healthy population?”
What are you even saying, that’s makes no sense. A freely trading population of sovereign individuals creates massive wealth. See the industrial revolution for evidence.
The best health care system would arise if government guns weren’t pointed at anybody and everybody — but no one can say what that system would be, because economies can’t be planned.
But the core issue isn’t even “what would be the best health care system for everybody?” The collectivist cultists think that’s the important thing, so they can’t stop talking about their spending per capita in Sweden bullshit, dropping all context. (Again, it’s the brain damage thing.)
The core issue is: by what right does anyone else control how you spend your money, trade with others, and live your life?
The core issue is there are entrenched interests in preserving the existing system. Those who benefit the most control the entrenchment of the system in place. This applies across a whole host of global industries. Corruption abounds.
Corruption abounds for sure. What is corrupted? The government’s illegitimate power over the innocent (non-criminals). When the government is in the economy, as it was never dreamed of being at the Constitution Convention, the 1% with government connections translate the setup into wealth transfers to themselves.
As long as the gov has economic levers, people will line up to push those levers and f everybody else over (just a little, of course). Actually even 99% of voters are desperately trying to play this game and get the system to bring them “their share” of other people’s stuff. In this age, few know better. Everybody knows they are a victim, but few understand in what way. If Jefferson were re-incarnated and ran for office today he couldn’t get 100 votes.
Few Americans understand the meaning of the Declaration today, that protecting the right of the individual to live freely by his or her own judgement is the one and only proper purpose of government. Outside of America, the grasp of this among the euro-zombies et al is a near perfect zero, just look around this comments section.
The Quaker has to pay for weapons, the rights for women people have to bow to the evangelicals, the poor have to bow to the rich. Talk sense.
OK guys, I asked a question and nobody answered. There are a couple of assumptions that could be made. 1) you can’t be arsed to answer me. 2) None of you on this site can afford to pay for a fully comprehensive health care package with no copays or deductibles at point of need. 3) You need to have tens of millions in America to have a comprehensive medical plan? Hundreds of millions? More? For the life of me most of your arguments on here are about as useful as the proverbial angels on a pinhead. Have you allgone off your heads?
The price would be too high so few would select it if it was available.
No a fully comprehensive Health care plan would cost 10% of gross income. Such a plan was started in the Second Reich in 1894 by Keiser Bill and Otto Von Bismark. These guys didn’t think it was socialist, they were genuinely concerned about the health of the German Nation. Are you really saying that European civil servants are better than yours?
If the customer is not paying for healthcare (directly), the demand increases without limit. Who can afford that?
There needs to be limits on those benefits.
In the USA it is mainly insurance coverage that limits those benefits. Elsewhere the rules may be set by government.
Nobody wants to be the one to have to say “No”. Sometimes it’s faceless bureaucrats, sometimes policy committees at an HMO.
It is never ‘fair’ in everyone’s minds.
Demonstrably untrue, Europe has cheaper health care and better outcomes.
Are you nuts???? Europe also has rationed medical care and much higher taxes. I try to be respectful of all opinions on this site but your post is ridiculous.
And what do you think your HMOs do? That’s right they ration. They are also rentiers and price gaugers and ghouls. American taxes +health care costs are higher than European taxes + we live longer than you. There are nuts abroad and they are the one’s who believe that the HMOs are part of free enterprise, you HMos are the antithesis of Adam Smith.
See my reply to Ted R. You realise that you are living in the 19th century don’t you.
No one has yet to come up with a workable plan that would provide health insurance to all Americans. Meanwhile Medicare and Medicaid continue marching towards insolvency. Even Trump doesn’t want to talk about this issue. It can’t be fixed especially with an aging population. If it could be fixed it would have happened by now. Ain’t gonna happen. It is every man for himself. Good thing the American people are to stupid to understand what is really happening and going to happen in the future with their health insurance
Obamacare is a nightmare!
For my wife and I premiums for the cheapest Obummercare plan is $13,000 a year, with a $6,500 deductible each. That means if we both needed it, we would need to spend $26,000 per year before we got a penny back!
I am a doctor that practices natural medicine with 25+ years of experience and I can tell you that the vast majority of medical intervention is unnecessary and destroys peoples health. It is all about the money.
If you earned £130,000 in the UK, you would be stopped £13000 National Insurance. This would cover you and your family. If your wife worked though she too would pay NI.
Are you saying that in the UK, you pay about 10% of your income to be covered by the National Insurance?
Yes
It cost about the same when you get insurance from the employer. You don’t see it because they pay most of it. Ask them for a full price (COBRA) and that gives you the real cost of “private” insurance. The health care in USA has been horrible for at least 20 years (before Obamacare). And let me repeat again didn’t Trump promised repeal and replace? Isn’t he singing “promises made promises kept” at every single rally and the people chants with him?. Let tell you in Venezuela when Chavez became president the slogan was: “now we have patria!” an everyone chanted it with him. Now that people has realized how bad they voted they chant: “we have no food, no security, no house, no healthcare but we have patria!”.
Before Obamination care my self paid health insurance costs were very reasonable and even though I had copays the coverage was decent. After Obamacare my insurance costs about doubled and I effectively have no coverage everything is deductible. I am basically paying for catastrophic protection. I would go without but I had children who needed to be covered. He basically fubb’d the health insurance market making it more expensive for everyone except those who get if for free, Medicaid. Trump and the republicans were basically full of shit bloviating they would repeal and replace. Obamacare is like the roach motel you can enter but never leave. There is no way out. If there was the republicans would have had a ready made plan on the shelf waiting to be put in place. If there retarded democrats had any brains whatsoever they would focus on instituting a single payer system and carefully explain all the facts about how it would be done and paid for. Instead they focus on bringing out right fascist/ communism into the mix. Its like living in an alternate universe none of this crap makes any sense.
“If there retarded democrats had any brains whatsoever they would focus on instituting a single payer system and carefully explain all the facts about how it would be done and paid for.”
%100 agree
How much would it cost for a health plan that once paid there were no further claims on the insured?
Mish said:
“By design, Obamacare forced the young and healthy to subsidize the obese, the smokers, and the terminally ill.’
Um…that’s like saying all Muslims are terrorists.
Can’t you keep it reality based and say:
“By design, Obamacare forced young and healthy to subsidize the old an sick.”?
Why do you think everyone who is sic is obese, smokers, and terminally ill?
“Prior to the Trump administration assuming office, reducing the number of uninsured children was a national success story,” said Joan Alker
Success?
A disgrace compared to the rest Planet Earth.
U.S.: Twice the price, worst system on Earth.
Only universal single payer healthcare will solve this problem, like MedicareForAll.
Talk about focusing on the wrong metric! It matters whether people can get access to health care (doctors, medicine, etc), not whether they have access to a corrupt financing scheme.
All of the people who dropped insurance had and still have the option to buy Obamacare. They chose to drop it. Some because public housing healthcare is repulsive, but the overwhelming majority dropped coverage because Obamacare is unaffordable.
F Obama. F Pelosi. F that bastard MIT sh!thead Gruber. And F all the socialists who shoved this corruption down our throats. Medical insurance started under socialist FDR, and every time these miserable socialists get a chance, they make the system worse and worse and worse.
When the nobel peace price -sshole wasn’t starting wars, he was making a messed up healthcare system 1000000x worse, all while exempting himself.
Great post. Well done.
“Medical insurance started under socialist FDR, and every time these miserable socialists get a chance, they make the system worse and worse and worse.”
Sure but the orange guy promised “repeal and replace” with majority in both houses… What’s up with that?
So many misconceptions about healthcare…
For point 5: Also remember to include “systems” outside of healthcare. Like the Soviet car industry, and the relatively unregulated worldwide computer industry. Or perhaps, the government ran Venezuelan oil industry, vs the somewhat less so US shale oil one.
The fear of death is a huge motivator and accounts for most of the successful rent-seeking by our medical industrial complex today. Certainly, nothing in the data supports our nearly-two-trillion-annual burn rate. Spain, and others, routinely produce better health results with dramatically lower spending per capita.
Anyone still believing the indigent lack access to healthcare in this country probably hasn’t been to a hospital emergency care facility in several decades.
Healthcare promises are always good political campaign fodder. Vote for just the right demagogue and you might live forever.
Absolutely anything politicians are involved in, end the same way. When your job is to promise people something you can’t pay for yourself, there really is no way to avoid that.
No Mish Trump is %100 responsible of this. Let me remind you: “Repeal and replace” promised for years no. Another thing: “promises made promises kept”. Really? I only see the ones he made to his billionaire friends and to corporations. The little people better get ready because it will get much worst for them. BTW like I said before Trump is being walked into a war with Iran. And no it is not the deep state. If there is a war with Iran is because he started the ball rolling when rejecting the nuclear deal. But heck I know you will vote for him again.
Yes, Drumpf is to blame for everything from Obamacare to Fukushima disaster to cost of tampons.
Rationalize it any way you want to make you feel better (yes you were fooled like many others) but the Orange king continuously said during his campaign and after taking office: repeal and replace. Not to mention the republicans were against obamacare and had 8 years to come up with something better and they didn’t because they don’t give a damn
He failed to repeal it, but he didn’t create the mess. Saying it’s 100% his fault is idiotic. TDS is making you stupid.
He made “repeal and replace” a cornerstone of his campaign. Your emperor has no clothes. BTW if he had a solution (or the republicans) they could have easily reverse the “mess”. BTW if you have per-existing conditions of any diseases thanks Obamacare that you are covered.
He is not my emperor. I don’t even live in the US. Take a pill, your TDS is really making you stupid.
You don’t live in the US and yet think that obamacare is a mess do tell how much you know of obamacare
I know enough. Lots of my friends and colleagues live in the US.
Trump inherited a bankrupt healthcare system created by a socialist president with no experience in the real world. BUT at least Obama tried to fix the system. Maybe the healthcare problem can’t be fixed because there is no workable solution? Do you think?
So doctors and insurance executives can drive Mercedes Benz and Porsches.
Doctors represent about 20% of the cost to the system. Most of the money goes to insurance shareholders and executives. The quickest solution to solve healthcare is to force all publicly traded insurance companies to become non-profit organizations so they have to spend upwards of 82% of their cash flow on health care instead of shareholder value and executive compensation.
The ACA already forces insurance companies to allocate a minimum of 80% of premiums towards recipient care. Unfortunately that hasn’t reduced premiums or costs..
“The quickest solution to solve healthcare is to force..”
Yeah! The solution is always to force someone …..
Try Freedom instead, and you may actually find something which works. Freedom to buy drugs from anyone, anywhere. To set up shop offering care for anyone. From anywhere. Any time. To build care facilities anywhere Etc., etc. IOW, freedom to route around every roadblock some entrenched, rent seeking, zero value add leech is currently getting government to enforce.
That’s how costs have been lowered, and service expanded to include more people, in every.single.area where costs have in fact gotten lower over time. Car, and cellphone, availability in South vs North Korea being what one would hope would be a fairly obvious example.
But hey, man! Let’s be like Kim and force someone…. something. Yeah!!
Freedom doesn’t work when it comes to staying healthy. Quite the opposite. The US is the most free unhealthy country in the developed world.
And….? If yo’ure not free to drink yourself to death on cranckcase oil, you are not free. Freedom is the important part. Not what other people choose to use theirs for.
There are socialized costs to freedom. If you dont agree you arent living in reality.
Most of the money goes to provide insurance coverage for the uninsured and those on medicare and medicaid.
Obama and his congressional criminal cronies sold ACA as a solution to the uninsured problem. It’s a mandate now that people have insurance. John Roberts and the other liberals on the supreme court backed it. This is a non starter now. Problem solved. No one gets to hem and haw about the “uninsured” anymore.
Have you been living under a rock? The passing of TCJA 2017 legally removed the individual mandate nearly 2 years ago.
That’s moot. People were paying the tax because they couldn’t afford insurance costs anyway. The point is the government had their shot and failed. The gov’t needs to get out of the market and the health care biz altogether.
Blow the whole system up. It is only recently that we let the medical industrial complex have so much power in our society.
Outcomes dont match expenditures. Problem started with the introduction of health insurance itself.
Spotlight needs to be on why costs so high, not who pays.
Touche!
The US has the worst health insurance system in the developed world.
This is because it is primarily a for-profit insurance system. The systems in the US that are not for profit actually have higher rates of coverage and care.
We Grubered some folks.
“For people who already have insurance, and the employers who are providing it, we will work to lower your premiums by up to $2,500 per family.”
— obama 2008