Are the Uninsured Signing Up for Obamacare? Maybe Not.

One
of the things we still don’t know about Obamacare is how many of
the people who have signed up for coverage under the law were
previously uninsured. The administration, which has long emphasized
that the central goal of the law is to expand coverage, says it
isn’t tracking that information. “That’s not a data point we are
really collecting in any sort of systematic way,” a senior federal
health official told
reporters earlier today. 

At least for now, then, we have to rely on imprecise, outside
data. And as The Washington Post
reports this afternoon, two new surveys suggest that the
uninsured are not exactly turning out in droves:

The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little
headway so far in signing up Americans who lack health insurance,
the Affordable Care Act’s central goal.

A pair of surveys released on Thursday suggest that just one in
10 uninsured people who qualify for private health plans through
the new marketplace have signed up for one — and that about half of
uninsured adults has looked for information on the online exchanges
or plans to look.

…

One of the surveys, by
the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., shows that, of people
who had signed up for coverage through the marketplaces by last
month, just one-fourth described themselves as having been without
insurance for most of the past year.

This is preliminary information; there’s still a month to go in
the sign-up process. It’s a survey sample, not a comprehensive look
at the entire sign-up population. And data from New York finds a
much higher percentage of sign-ups were previously uninsured
(although
New York is a special case with an essentially nonexistent
individual insurance market prior to Obamacare). Even still,
however, it seems to indicate that the sign-ups we’ve seen so far
haven’t been concentrated amongst the long-term
uninsured.