Obamacare Has Not Cut Uninsured Rate For Kids

The children's uninsured rate hardly budged in the first year of the health law's expansion of coverage, even as the rate for adults dropped four percentage points, according to reports from the Urban Institute and Georgetown's Center for Children and Families.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog: Obamacare Has Reduced The Uninsured Rate For Virtually Everyone — Except Kids
The good news is that children under 18 have had a pretty low uninsured rate over the past few years, around 7 percent, thanks to previous coverage expansions of Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program. But the children's uninsured rate has hardly budged in the first six months of 2014, even as the uninsured rate for adults dropped 4 percentage points over the past year, according to the new Urban Institute Health Reform Monitoring Survey. The researchers say this is the first measure of the Affordable Care Act's effects on children's coverage (Millman, 9/9).

The Fiscal Times: Obamacare Has Not Cut Uninsured Rate for Kids
While the president’s health care law has significantly sliced the uninsured rates for low income people, minorities and adults in general this year, new research shows that the Affordable Care Act has yet to make a substantial impact on one very important population: kids. In two new reports from the Urban Institute and Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families (CCF) that examine how Obamacare has impacted families, researchers concluded there was no “statistically significant change” in the uninsured rate for kids 17 and younger between September 2013 and June of this year—the time spanning the law’s first solid year of implementation (Ehley, 9/9).

Politico Pro: Many Uninsured Kids Eligible But Not Enrolled In Coverage
The ACA did not do much to insure more kids, but it did help their parents, according to a pair of studies out Tuesday. But a majority of the kids who don’t have health coverage are eligible for existing programs. About 7.3 percent of children ages 17 and under were uninsured with no statistically significant change since just before Obamacare open enrollment, according to one of the studies, by researchers at the Georgetown Center for Children and Families and the Urban Institute (Wheaton, 9/9).