4 thoughts on “Obamacare holding up during pandemic”
The story is paywalled, so I don’t know the details. But a priori, it hardly seems surprising that if the government is willing to (at least partially) pay for medical insurance for people without income, it will be successful in actually doing that.
And it appears that the bulk of the coverage has been Medicaid, i.e., governments directly paying for medical care for the poor. (Though in a lot of cases, people with no coverage and no money can get care which is paid for through a free care system that diffuses the costs onto other patients, which is effectively a tax. So things may be less different from the past than they appear.)
Where this gets dicey is that Medicaid has slowly been breaking the state budgets, which means that states have been unwilling or unable to raise taxes commensurately with increased Medicaid expenses.
Indeed, the actual test of whether Obamacare is “holding up” is not whether people can be put into the state of “being insured” by signing them up for Medicaid. That’s just a bureaucratic act. The test is whether the states can pay for the consequent medical care, in whatever the relevant sense of “can pay for” is. We probably won’t know that until the end of 2021 at the earliest.
The story is paywalled, so I don’t know the details. But a priori, it hardly seems surprising that if the government is willing to (at least partially) pay for medical insurance for people without income, it will be successful in actually doing that.
This link works in a private window for similar content: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/12/29/nation/obamacare-its-first-big-test-safety-net-is-holding-up-so-far/
And it appears that the bulk of the coverage has been Medicaid, i.e., governments directly paying for medical care for the poor. (Though in a lot of cases, people with no coverage and no money can get care which is paid for through a free care system that diffuses the costs onto other patients, which is effectively a tax. So things may be less different from the past than they appear.)
Where this gets dicey is that Medicaid has slowly been breaking the state budgets, which means that states have been unwilling or unable to raise taxes commensurately with increased Medicaid expenses.
Indeed, the actual test of whether Obamacare is “holding up” is not whether people can be put into the state of “being insured” by signing them up for Medicaid. That’s just a bureaucratic act. The test is whether the states can pay for the consequent medical care, in whatever the relevant sense of “can pay for” is. We probably won’t know that until the end of 2021 at the earliest.
I believe that the federal government is picking up 90% of the tab for Medicaid expansion so this may not be a big issue.