More than 16 million people who did not have health insurance before have gained it through the 2010 Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, the federal government said Monday.
More than 14 million adults have health insurance either from the new exchanges or through expanded access to Medicaid, the Health and Human Services Department said.
Another 2 million young adults aged under 26 got health insurance because of a provision that allows their parents to keep them on their health insurance plans, HHS said.
“Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act almost five years ago, about 16.4 million uninsured people have gained health coverage — the largest reduction in the uninsured in four decades," HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell said in a statement.
The administration says about 11 million people signed up for or renewed health insurance on the new exchanges for 2015. The law was designed in part to get more Americans covered by health insurance.
“There are trade-offs in the ACA that reasonable people disagree about. But with 16.4 million covered, it is doing what it set out to do,” Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health insurance matters, said via Twitter.
