We learned last week that now 11.4 million Americans have private insurance due to Obamacare -- mostly people who couldn't afford health insurance before the Affordable Care Act was passed. And millions more have insurance through Medicaid now. The Republicans are loathe to admit it, but Obamacare has been even more successful than predicted.
And now there's more good news -- every single state in this country has experienced a drop in the number of their uninsured citizens due to Obamacare, in spite of Republican efforts to sink the program on both the state and federal level. That doesn't mean those GOP efforts haven't had an effect. They have kept millions from getting health insurance -- condemning them to do with important preventive care (and sometimes any care at all, causing about 17,000 a year to die unnecessarily).
Those states that have cooperated with health care reform (by creating a state exchange and expanding Medicaid) have experienced an average decline in the uninsured between 2013 and 2014 of about 4.8 points. But those states (mainly GOP-controlled states) that have not created a state exchange or have not expanded Medicaid, or both, have had a decline of only about 2.7 points. It is ridiculous of the Republicans to intentionally deny health care to millions of citizens -- just so they can show their displeasure at having an African-American president, but that is what they have done.
The numbers above are from a recently released Gallup Poll -- done between January 2nd and December 30th of 2014 of a random national sample of 178,072. The margin of error for each state is between 2 and 4 points.
