A new Gallup survey illustrates the uneven impact of the law. HuffPo maps the data:
Margot Sanger-Katz contends that the “numbers demonstrate the big difference the Affordable Care Act could have for the country’s poorer states”:
I’ve written before about the “two Americas” in health care, with richer Democratic-leaning states expanding coverage to more of their populations and poorer Republican-leaning states sitting out the expansion.
According to the new Gallup poll, Arkansas and Kentucky have had the largest reductions in uninsured rates in the country. Arkansas reduced its rate by more than 10 percentage points, to 12.4 percent from 22.5 percent last year; the rate in Kentucky declined by 8.5 percentage points. (The margin of sampling error for the results varies by state size, but is around plus or minus two percentage points for those two.) West Virginia also made Gallup’s top-10 list. These three states had very high numbers of residents who lacked insurance and qualified for the new public programs; it is not a surprise that, with a commitment to these new programs, they saw significant coverage gains.
It’s one of the great tragedies of the last few years: that a black president offered many poor white states a healthcare law that would help them more than others – and most chose to reject it. I mean, it’s not as if Massachusetts needed it. Cohn draws attention to the tangible consequences of states opposing Obamacare:
[T]he numbers do suggest a pattern, one Gallup’s own researchers observe. The states that made the most headway covering the uninsured, according to Gallup, are states in which officials decided to build their own insurance marketplaces and to make all low-income people eligible for Medicaid, as the Affordable Care Act originally envisioned.
Pivoting off the Gallup numbers, Greg Sargent asserts that Obamacare is becoming less central to this year’s campaigns:
All of these little data points help tell a larger story, which Politico told really well today: The fading of Obamacare as an issue in many states, including those with hard fought Senate races with massive expenditures such as those from the Koch group. To be sure, Dems very well could lose control of the Senate. But it is becoming increasingly accepted that even if that does happen, Obamacare might not be a major reason why — the makeup of the map and the economy could prove far more important in determining the outcome.
The Dish 