Drum is encouraged by Gallup’s latest polling:
The CBO estimates that the number of uninsured will drop by 4-5 percentage points in 2014 thanks to Obamacare. If you use 2011-12 as an approximate baseline, Gallup reports a drop of about 1.5 percentage points through February. These numbers probably aren’t precisely comparable, but they represent a ballpark—and it doesn’t look like a statistical fluke anymore.
Against it have to be arrayed other surveys suggesting that the uninsured form a much smaller proportion of Obamacare patients than anyone might have hoped for:
Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look.
To my mind, if those numbers pan out, it would be a devastating result for the law. For a new law this disruptive to fail to reduce significantly the numbers of uninsured is a pretty fundamental indictment. The trouble is: we don’t really know for sure yet, and all these surveys may be misleading. Jon Cohn is appropriately cautious about the Gallup numbers:
It’s a sign of progress, but only a sign.
Gallup is probably the best available source for real-time data on the uninsured rate. And the pattern Gallup detected—unusually large increases in coverage among African-Americans and Latinos—would be consistent with a program that benefits low-income groups the most. But Gallup’s survey is not as reliable as the big government surveys on the uninsured, which won’t be available until next year. In addition, the Gallup data for last year, 2013, shows a very strange pattern, with the uninsured rate spiking to 18 percent in the middle of the year for no apparent reason. That makes it hard to be certain exactly what’s happening right now.
Philip Klein puts the numbers in perspective:
It’s possible that people who were losing insurance as a result of changes in the law last year have been shifting to new plans on the Obamacare exchanges — which would still be consistent with the theory that Obamacare hasn’t made major gains among the long-term uninsured.
Additionally, taking the longer view, the 15.9 percent rate isn’t historically that low. Measured monthly, the uninsured rate had been as low as 15.9 percent in early 2011. In 2008, the year Obama campaigned for president promising universal health insurance, the uninsured rate was consistently below its current rate, reaching a low of 14.4 percent quarterly and a monthly low of 13.9 percent.
Bernstein’s bottom line:
It would be great if we could get a definitive “Obamacare works!” or “Obamacare failed!” But things don’t work that way. Even when we get a lot more information, researchers are going to argue about exactly what is going well or badly, and by how much.
So, yes, Democrats have something to be optimistic about today. Beyond that, there’s only one thing we can say with any certainty: Anyone who says that health-care reform has already proven to be a solid success or a total failure is talking through their partisan hat.
The Dish 