Medicaid Enrollment Is Dropping Thanks to Trump
The percentage of uninsured Americans has gone up for the first time since Obama’s health law passed
As the Democratic presidential candidates debate how to best best provide every single American with health insurance, a new report confirms health experts’ worst fears: Right now, Americans are losing their health insurance.
A U.S. Census Bureau report released last week found that the percentage of Americans without health insurance jumped from 7.9% in 2017 to 8.5% in 2018 — an increase of about 27.5 million people. This marks the first time the number of uninsured has increased since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed in 2010. (And there’s evidence to suggest the decline might continue — 9.1% of Americans were uninsured in March, according to that same report.) The primary driver of this overall drop was a dip in Medicaid enrollment.
Rachel Garfield, co-director of the program on Medicaid and the uninsured at the Kaiser Family Foundation, attributes the decline in Medicaid enrollment to a variety of factors. Our growing economy has not correlated with an uptick in private insurance; Garfield theorizes these new workers’ jobs put their income above the Medicaid threshold. In theory, such workers should be able to transition to subsidized…
