ECONOMIC REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT

unable to obtain insurance at any price. For many others, health insurance
was available but unaffordable. Many workers faced strong financial
incentives to remain in low-quality jobs, or jobs for which they were poorly
matched, because they needed the health insurance those jobs provided,
even when a better job was available or they saw an opportunity to go back
to school or to start a business.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) introduced comprehensive reforms
to address these and other problems in the health care system. It requires
insurers to offer health insurance on the same terms to all applicants
regardless of their health status. Families can use the Health Insurance
Marketplace to compare and purchase policies with the certainty that they
will not be denied coverage, and the law provides financial assistance to
ensure that coverage is affordable. The law also supported an expansion of
Medicaid for the lowest-income Americans. In total, the ACA has resulted
in an additional 20 million American adults gaining health insurance coverage;
reduced disparities in coverage by age, race, and income; and reduced
poverty and inequality. (See Chapter 4 for further discussion of the Obama
Administration’s record on health care policy.)
Reducing Disparities in Health Coverage and Health Status
The ACA has substantially reduced inequality in access to health care.
It has increased the number of American adults with health insurance by
20 million as of early 2016 and contributed to the largest drop in the share
of the population without health insurance since the creation of Medicare
and Medicaid in the 1960s (Furman and Fiedler 2014e; Uberoi, Finegold,
and Gee 2016). From 2010—the year of the law’s enactment—through the
first half of 2016, the share of the population without health insurance (the
uninsured rate) has fallen from 16.0 percent to 8.9 percent (Figure 3-6).
Uninsured rates varied markedly across different population groups
in 2010 (Figures 3-7A, 3-7B, and 3-7C). Uninsured rates for African
Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans were substantially higher than
those for Whites. And while nearly every American over age 65 had health
coverage thanks to Medicare, more than 30 percent of those between the
ages of 19 and 26 lacked health insurance. Families with incomes below 150
percent of the Federal poverty line lacked health insurance at a rate 9 times
that for families with incomes above 400 percent of the poverty line.
Improvements in health insurance coverage have reduced inequality
in access to health insurance along numerous dimensions, as demonstrated
by the particularly large coverage gains for groups with elevated uninsured
rates prior to reform. Between 2010 and 2015, coverage rates increased by 25
percentage points for Native Americans, 11 percentage points for Hispanics,
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