Dive Brief:
- New data from the CDC's National Center of Health Statistics show a drop in the percentage of people under age 65 who reported difficulty paying their medical bills, from 21.3% (56.5 million) in 2011 to 16.5% (44.5 million) in the first six months of 2015.
- The data in the agency's early release of estimates from the National Health Interview Survey come from an analysis of information collected from 417,326 people in the Family Core and Supplemental components.
- The timeframe for the drop corresponds with the implementation of the ACA, which has grown health coverage by almost 18 million additional people since 2011.
Dive Insight:
The findings come as President-elect Donald Trump and the GOP prepare to replace the healthcare reforms that brought the increase in health insurance coverage. The form and extent to which an Obamacare repeal/revamp might reverse any healthcare trends of the past several years remain matters of speculation given that no official replacement plan yet exists, and that Trump's intentions don't appear to be set.
After promising to outright repeal Obamacare during his campaign, he has since said he may keep certain popular provisions, such as allowing adult children to remain on their parents' plans until age 26.
Among the other findings of the new report were that the percentage of children in families having problems paying medical bills dropped from 23.2% in 2011 to 18.1% during the first 6 months of 2015.
There are also differences in coverage status highlighted in the results. In the first half of 2016, among people under 65, those having difficulty paying medical bills included 29.8% of those who were uninsured, 21.8% of those with public coverage, and 12.7% of those with private coverage. In terms of income, during that same time, those facing difficulty included 24.5% of those who were poor, 27.1% of those termed near-poor, and 12.2% of those who were not poor.
Regarding gender, the stats showed that within each year analyzed, women were more likely to be in families struggling with medical bills than men, though the percentage of women struggling dropped from 22.1% in 2011 to 17.3% in early 2015. That suggests impacts from protections to women's health offered under the ACA, such as birth control coverage and equal pricing, which could controversially be undone by a repeal of the ACA.