Strategic Planning & Timelines

This report examines how many of the uninsured in each state would be eligible for health coverage assistance programs - i.e. Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and subsidized private coverage through the new health insurance marketplaces - under the Affordable Care Act. The report also estimates the anticipated decrease in the uninsured population under the ACA in each state. Finally, the report examines the share of those remaining uninsured under the ACA in each state who would be eligible for, but not enrolled in, assistance programs.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has implications for “boomerang children” and their parents. “Boomerangs,” young adults who (often for financial reasons) move in with their parents, may expose their parents to significant tax penalties, even if the rest of the family has health coverage. This brief summarizes the available demographic information about the boomerang population, and provides an analysis of a common example to illustrate the ACA’s implications to such families.

In states that do not expand Medicaid, nearly five million poor uninsured adults have incomes above Medicaid eligibility levels but below poverty and may fall into a “coverage gap” of earning too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to qualify for Marketplace premium tax credits. Most of these people have very limited coverage options and are likely to remain uninsured. This brief describes the coverage gap and presents estimates of the population that falls into this situation.

This brief estimates the number of uninsured community health center (CHC) patients who would gain coverage under the Affordable Care Act using data from the 2009 HRSA Survey of CHC patients and 2011 Uniform Data System. The authors find that were all states to implement the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion, an estimated 5 million uninsured health center patients would be eligible for coverage. However, over one million uninsured patients – 72 percent of whom live in southern states – who would have been eligible for coverage will remain uninsured because of states’ decisions to opt out of the expansion.

Though the economy continues to add jobs at a moderate pace, some of the jobs added in recent months have been part-time, prompting critics of health reform to argue that it is the culprit. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires larger employers (those with at least 50 full-time-equivalent workers) to offer health coverage to their full-time employees or pay a penalty.  The critics claim that this requirement creates a disincentive to hire full-timers and that one can already see the shift to part-time work in the data. Recent data, however, provide scant evidence that health reform is causing a significant shift toward part-time work, and there’s every reason to believe that the ultimate effect will be small as a share of total employment.