First, the good news: The Affordable Care Act has resulted in a significant increase in the percentage of Americans with health insurance. Last September, the Department of Health and Human Services published a new analysis estimating that 17.6 million previously uninsured people had gained health insurance due to various provisions of the ACA. Similarly, a paper published last summer in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the ACA's first two open enrollment periods were associated with improvements in "self-reported coverage, access to primary care and medications, affordability, and health," findings that are echoed in a recent three-part report from AARP and the Urban Institute.
Now, the bad news: According to a report released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation, almost three million low-income Americans are still without health insurance due to the Medicaid coverage gap. While middle-class Americans without employer-provided health care have enjoyed significant improvements in health care since the ACA's implementation, the 2.9 million poor Americans in the Medicaid coverage gap have been left behind and continue to have limited access to the health and economic benefits conferred by health insurance coverage.
[For more of this story, written by Dwyer Gunn, go to http://www.psmag.com/health-an...overage-gap-persists]
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