Creeping Socialism in Health Insurance

Jeffrey H. Anderson writes,

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (see table 1.2b), 66.8 percent of those living in the United States had private health insurance in 2007. Now, as of 2015 (the most recent year for which figures are available), only 65.6 percent of those living in the United States have private health insurance.

…Meanwhile, the CDC figures show that the percentage of people living in the United States who have public health coverage has risen dramatically, from 18.1 percent in 2007 to 25.3 percent in 2015 (see table 1.2a).

I was wondering how much of this reflects people aging into Medicare, but then I clicked on the link to the report and the tables are for Americans under 65. My guess is that future health care reforms (“fixing Obamacare”) will move us further in that direction.

12 thoughts on “Creeping Socialism in Health Insurance

  1. What one would expect is due to lack of affordability and economics trumping politics for the states that didn’t expand medicaid initially though the largest public shift has been children.

  2. My guess is that future health care reforms (“fixing Obamacare”) will move us further in that direction.

    The cynical among us will tell you that Obamacare’s supporters knew it would fail all along, with the only alternative that could fix it being single payer.

    I frankly don’t think legislators are that capable of understanding economics or of escaping the hubris that government might not succeed at what they are commanding it to do.

    • And yet, despite the obvious maliciousness of the left, the right is still playing to lose.

  3. Sheer garbage. The author should be ashamed of himself. If you are going to blame Obamacare for all of this you should first try to get the history of private health insurance in this country and make sure you are not taking correlation and making it causation.

    I am thinking the man is well aware of the decrease in the percentage of people with private health insurance that has been present in the US for decades, yet somehow he makes a big deal of 1.2% decrease in private insured individuals over a period of 8 years.

    Meanwhile, he totally ignores that :

    “During 1968–1980, the percentage of persons under age 65 years who
    had private coverage remained stable at about 79%, while the
    number with private coverage increased from 140.5 million to 154.1
    million persons (Tables 1 and 2).

    During 1980–2007, the percentage with private coverage declined
    steadily, except during 1996–1999. From 1999 to 2007, the
    percentage of persons under age 65 with any private coverage
    declined at an average rate of more than 1% per year, to 67%
    in 2007.”

    https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr017.pdf

    It just amazes me how people keep reading these attacks on the ACA taking them at their word without realizing that almost every single one of them ignores where we were before the ACA, and assigns any and all problems to the the ACA.

    Look, the ACA is far from perfect, but it has moved the healthcare system into a far better place than we would be without it.

    This man should not be paid attention to.l

  4. Well, I guess “socialism” has come to be degraded to mean “the government doing stuff,” but I guess both the right and the pseudo-left are collectively responsible. Hell, even Bernie calls himself a socialist, even though he isn’t one, so whatever.

    Anyways, I just thought I’d note that Dean Baker has been pointing out that the increase in U.S. health care costs have decreased since the implementation of Obamacare, contrary to propaganda.

    There are a lot of different schemes for government-based health care systems around the world. Generally the best funded ones get the best results, but they all get better results than the U.S. in the aggregate and they’re all much cheaper than the U.S.

    So yeah, I hope the government takes over health insurance in the U.S.. Private insurers add precisely zilch to the quality of health care.

    • Just in case that gets through moderation, I meant the “the rate of increase in health care costs has decreased.”

      I suppose it would be better to proofread my comments once in a while.

  5. I have to apologize. My initial post on this subject was incomplete. I was well aware of the decades long trend in the reduction of privately insured individuals in the US, so I jumped on that lack of context provided by the author. The problem is I overlooked something in this column that is even more profound.

    The problem is it makes the author look worse.

    As I went downstairs for a cup of coffee after making my initial reply, I started thinking why would the author start his numbers in 2007? The answer is pretty obvious, the Great Recession and the loss of private health insurance because of it. So I pulled up the author’s link to the CDC numbers, and it is beyond belief this man could do this.

    The numbers for those with private insurance under 65 are:

    2007 66.8
    2008 65.4
    2009 62.9
    2010 61.2
    2011 61.2
    2012 61.0
    2013 61.0
    2014 63.6
    2015 65.6

    I could actually say that since the ACA exchanges came into existence the percentage of privately insured persons in the US has INCREASED by 4.6% and be correct. But I could not say that this decrease in socialism is totally due to the ACA because I am honest. There are many other factors involved.

    But what I can say and be totally correct is that the ACA in no way, shape or form has contributed to the “Creeping Socialism In the Health Insurance”.

    Biggest cherry pick of a starting date since the climate deniers used 1998 to start their “pause” inanity(they don’t do that much anymore either).

  6. Medicaid expansion via conditional federal grants remains the least well understood consequence of the ACA, at least among the media and the general public.

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