Exclusive: Nearly 7 million uninsured Americans qualify for free health insurance
Source: Vox
Biden’s next health care challenge will be enrolling uninsured people who already qualify for benefits.
By Dylan Scott @dylanlscott dylan.scott@vox.com Apr 1, 2021, 8:00am EDT
After the passage of President Joe Biden’s first Covid-19 relief plan, nearly 7 million additional uninsured Americans now qualify for free health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, according to new federal projections shared exclusively with Vox.
The American Rescue Plan (ARP), which takes effect on Thursday, expanded eligibility for the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies — federal aid to help people pay for insurance plans bought on the individual marketplace. It also made the subsidies more generous for the people who already qualify for them. It expanded the number of people currently without any insurance coverage who could enroll in a plan for free.
Roughly 29 million people currently living in the US lack health insurance. According to the new HHS estimates, about 6.8 million of them could now purchase an ACA plan with no monthly premium, and another 1.3 million could sign up for a health plan that costs less than $50 a month. Many of those people already qualified for free or low-cost coverage prior to the ARP, but based on the federal projections, the new law’s expansion of the ACA made an additional 2 million Americans eligible for free or cheap coverage.
A low premium is no guarantee that a plan’s out-of-pocket costs will also be low enough for people to find it affordable. But about 1.9 million people with incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the poverty level can get insurance with no monthly premium that will cover 94 percent of their medical costs, according to federal estimates. And about two-thirds of uninsured Black and Hispanic/Latinx Americans, who are less likely to have coverage than their white peers, qualify for zero-cost coverage.
Read more: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22360870/american-rescue-plan-act-premium-tax-credit-health-insurance
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