Obamacare 5th Birthday

Today is the 5th birthday of Obamacare, and many of its supporters are excited about recent data showing how successful it has been.  Over 16 million Americans have managed to get health insurance through the programs it created, and the estimated percentage of uninsured adults in the U.S. has dropped from 20.3% to 13.2% in the last two years.  By these metrics, Obamacare has indeed been a success (assuming we can find evidence that attributes these gains to Obamacare; no such evidence currently exists).

The problem with all of this excitement is that the rate of insured Americans is not the important part.  Obamacare was designed, according to its supporters, to help the poor get better access to health care (which is why its official name is "Affordable Care Act").  More Americans may be insured, but what do the numbers specifically for the poor look like?  Has the percentage of insured poor Americans improved as much as the national average, or is that 13.2% almost exclusively the poor?  Really though, even this is not the important metric.  It is the Affordable Care Act, not the Affordable Insurance Act.  The real question is: Are the poor in the U.S. actually receiving improved health care?  In corollary to that, are the U.S. poor significantly healthier than they were before?

The success or failure of Obamacare has nothing to do with health insurance.  The only guarantee with increased numbers of Americans being insured is that the insurance companies are making more money.  The long standing quality problem with U.S. health insurance was not really addressed by Obamacare.  High deductibles are still a major problem, and there is no reason to believe that Obamacare has solved this problem, especially for the poor who still cannot afford the high premiums required for lower deductible plans.  It would be quite interesting to see the data on how much more money health insurance companies have paid out in claims to their poor customers.  This would at least be an indicator of whether the poor are even benefiting at all from Obamacare.  If the payouts are not rising at the same rate that insured Americans are, then Obamacare is essentially scalping the poor for the benefit of the rich insurance companies.

Aside from general success or failure, which depends solely on how the law has affected the actual health of the poor, the question of payouts is very important.  Is Obamacare really a law the helps the poor, or is it legalized government extortion that only profits health insurance companies?  If it is not helping the poor significantly, then its costs are not justified, and it should be abolished as quickly as possible.  If it really is providing significant help to the poor (which I doubt, though I am prepared to be proven wrong), then the evidence of that should be made public.  Currently, however, the evidence we have only indicates that more people are giving money to insurance companies.  There is no evidence that this is actually benefiting anyone else.