Dive Brief:
- New research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute concludes that 5.4 million previously uninsured adults picked up ACA policies between September and early March.
- Researchers found that young adults aged 18 to 30 saw a strong pickup in coverage. There was a 4.3 percentage point drop in the uninsured rate between Q3 2013 and Q1 2014, to 19.5%, according to Becker's Hospital Review.
- These results suggest a positive future for the ACA, as young adults are "a big chunk of the uninsured," Genevieve Kenney, PhD, co-director and a senior fellow at the Institute's Health Policy Center, told Becker's.
Dive Insight:
From the launch of the ACA, public policy officials have worried that the population enrolled in the exchange-based plans would skew too heavily toward older, chronically ill, expensive-to-insure consumers. Naysayers threatened that such a population would generate a death spiral in which enrollees got sicker, policies got higher, and eventually, the entire market became unsustainable. Any sign that the exchanges are attracting younger, arguably healthier beneficiaries relieves some worries that this kind of death spiral is on the way.