Health care lessons from Texas: Who are the uninsured? Part 2

Finding health insurance coverage for millions without it could be a daunting task, but prices and markets and services change, making plans for affordable for Texans. Charles Miller, JD, director of health and economic mobility policy for Texas 2036, continues his discussion about that organization’s research on why Texas has some of the nation’s worst figures for health insurance coverage.

Charles Miller, JD: But going back to that first group of people, when the Affordable Care Act first rolled out and it was available back in 2014, 2015, and people went on prices that they saw were much higher than they are now. Affordability has just increased for a number of reasons, due to state and federal actions, and the prices that are available now, and especially at the time that our survey and focus groups were being conducted, had changed dramatically. And so for those folks, our message was, go take another look. This group, I would say, was probably the smallest group that had actually gone on previously and had a very data-informed opinion. The larger group, we think, seemed to be getting their perceptions of affordability largely from media coverage talking about premium increases and gross premium increases, as well as maybe just political perceptions of the program based on their political news. And to those folks, our message was, go take a look at this and go in with an open mind and just check it out. When people found out that they were eligible for plans that were, again, under $25, under $50, and in many cases, free plans, that really changed their views of what was available for them. Now there were other there were other groups of people and other reasons that compounded on these but those were the big factors, the biggest factors we found as to why the existing population that was eligible for these plans had not signed up. And the numbers are wild, right? So we had 5 million uninsured folks in Texas, and our calculations at the time was roughly 40% of them were eligible for a free plan. Now that was in the world where we had the enhanced subsidies still in place that have since expired. Those numbers are a little bit lower now than they were, but we would still estimate that of the uninsured, a little over a million of those folks are still eligible for a free plan and had not signed up at that time.