Dive Brief:
- A RAND Corp. survey has found that there was an estimated net gain of 9.3 million American adults with health insurance from September 2013 to mid-March.
- According to researchers the increase came from enrollment in the ACA marketplaces, Medicaid and employer-based health insurance.
- Of those who had previously been uninsured but got insured by mid-March, 7.2 million received employer-based insurance, 3.6 million got Medicaid, and 1.4 million bought policies through the ACA exchanges.
Dive Insight:
Here's some interesting data. Apparently, the bulk of Americans who got health insurance got the policies through their employer, not the state or the exchange marketplaces. (Though it's worth noting that these numbers don't account for the surge in enrollment in ACA plans just before the March 31 deadline.) It's hard to tell what phenomenon accounts for the millions of people who got employer-based during this period, other than to assume that they all got new jobs that came with benefits. Regardless, we're clearly at a record-breaking point enrollment-wise; according to Gallup, the US uninsured rate fell to 15.6% for the first three months of the year, the lowest number it has found since 2008.