Power

Ohio’s Uninsured Rates Plummet After Obamacare Embrace

The number of Ohioans without health insurance has dropped by about half since 2012, after the state's GOP Gov. John Kasich drew the scorn from fellow Republicans when he expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

The number of Ohioans without health insurance has dropped by about half since 2012, after the state's GOP Gov. John Kasich drew the scorn from fellow Republicans when he expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Shutterstock

The number of Ohioans without health insurance has dropped by about half since 2012, after the state’s GOP Gov. John Kasich drew the scorn of fellow Republicans when he expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The 2015 Ohio Medicaid Assessment Survey, released this week, showed that Ohio’s expansion of Medicaid—a central piece of the ACA—was key in dropping the adult uninsured rate to 8.7 percent and children’s uninsured rate to 2 percent from 16 and 4.7 percent, respectively.

The survey showed that making Medicaid more widely available helped boost Ohio’s Medicaid rolls to three million people.

Ohio stands in stark contrast to other Republican-dominated states that have roundly rejected key provisions of the ACA designed to bolster health-care availability to those who can’t afford high private insurance premiums but have incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid.

Republican governors, including Rick Scott in Florida, took hard-line stances against the ACA and said they would take no action if the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the law this summer and left millions without access to health care. Scott said Floridians losing health insurance through the ACA was a “federal problem.”

Ohio’s expansion of Medicaid and the state’s falling rates of uninsured adults and children has proven a political liability for Gov. John Kasich, a GOP presidential nominee. Kasich defended his stance on the ACA during the first Republican presidential debate.

“And finally, the working poor, instead of having them come into the emergency rooms where it costs more, where they’re sicker and we end up paying, we brought a program in here to make sure that people could get on their feet,” he said.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a 2016 Republican presidential hopeful, criticized Kasich’s ACA stance, charging that the federal government’s financial assistance in expanding Medicaid wasn’t “free money” because the United States borrows from China. The right-wing group Club for Growth has also leveled harsh critiques of Kasich’s decision to make health care more widely available to those who couldn’t afford it.

One other GOP candidate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, expanded Medicaid, while Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker opposed efforts to make health care more widely available to his state’s uninsured.

Walker, in a policy paper released this week, said he would repeal the ACA if he were to win the White House in 2016, though his proposal did not include details about how he would replace the health-care expansion. More than 13 million Americans would have their health insurance taken away if the ACA were repealed.

States with Democratic governors and Democratic-majority legislatures moved quickly in implementing central parts of the ACA meant to slash uninsured rates. California, for example, has seen encouraging results of the state’s embrace of the ACA.

More than two-thirds of Californians who were uninsured at the start of the ACA’s implementation have since gained health-care coverage. Prior to the coverage expansions created by the ACA—also known as Obamacare—California had the nation’s largest population of uninsured non-elderly adults at nearly six million.

Most of those Californians who wanted health coverage felt they couldn’t afford it, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study released this summer.