Number of Americans without health insurance grows in Trump’s first year, new figures show
Noam N. Levey, January 16, 2018
The number of Americans without health coverage, which declined for years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, shot up in President Trump’s first year in office, according to data from a new national survey.
At the end of 2017, 12.2% of U.S. adults lacked health insurance, up from 10.9% at the end of 2016, as President Obama was completing his final term.
The increase of 1.3 percentage points, although modest, marks the first time since at least 2008 that the share of adults without insurance increased from the previous year, according to the report from Gallup, which conducts a widely followed survey asking Americans about their health coverage.
The increase indicates that 3.2 million Americans lost health coverage in 2017, Gallup concluded.
The decline in coverage was most pronounced among slices of the population on which the Obama administration and its allies had focused enrollment efforts: young adults, blacks, Latinos and households making less than $36,000 a year, Gallup found.
The losses follow years of historic insurance gains driven by the healthcare law’s expansion of coverage, which started being fully implemented in 2014.
National survey data from the federal government and other sources suggest that more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans gained coverage between 2013 and 2017.
There is increasing evidence that these gains are improving patients’ access to medical care and relieving financial pressure, particularly on poorer households.
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But many Republicans, including leading Trump administration officials, have dismissed the coverage gains as meaningless. They have argued that the coverage provided under the healthcare law is unaffordable — because out-of-pocket costs are too high — or that patients face too many restrictions in their choice of doctors.
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And recent moves by the Trump administration to weaken insurance rules are expected to further destabilize insurance markets.
“It seems likely that the uninsured rate will rise further in the years ahead,” the Gallup report notes.