Half of health care uninsured don’t know they are required to buy insurance under Obamacare

Surprise! I was quite certain a significant number of the health care uninsured – a relatively small number in the US – would not know they will be required to go out and buy health care insurance on their own. Now that everyone should be aware of the health care legislation, Gallup went out and asked a few questions.

To be fair, President Obama and the health care mandate express did use the auto insurance comparison. Hey, if you’re going to own and drive a car, you need to have car insurance. Just like auto insurance, if you want to live and breath in the US and have access to the health care system, you need to have health insurance.

Really… that was one of their arguments. From Gallup.

uninsured-not-award

So more than four in 10 of the people who will be most effected by this legislation have no idea they need to go out to a private source or one of those state exchanges to buy health care coverage. More than half understand that. I’m willing to bet a small percentage of those without health insurance who know they have to buy, never wanted it in the first place because they were self-insured. Do you think many of those who are “aware” figure the Obama stash will some how open up to provide them cash for coverage?

Keep in mind the cost of fines as compared to buying actual decent coverage is small, so many people – including many businesses – will just pay the fine to the government so it’s a lot cheaper for them. That’s the push to a fully-controlled single-payer system run exclusively by the government.

With roughly six months to go before Americans are required to carry health insurance, slightly more than half of the uninsured population is aware of that requirement. Making sure the uninsured are aware of the health insurance requirement and getting them onto a health plan by the end of the year is an important goal for the Obama administration and crucial to the ACA’s success. One of the hurdles these efforts must overcome will be the perception of the uninsured that they cannot afford health insurance, the main reason they give for not having it.

My emphasis, and it’s not just a perception. Those really in need will never be able to afford the premiums – with the mandated coverage in place – nor will they be able to afford the fines. What then?

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Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

14 Comments

  1. Dimsdale on June 28, 2013 at 7:49 am

    What???? You mean ?bamacare isn’t free???? Pardon my sarcasm, but this just reinforces my rather low opinion of low information voters, who could only be ?bama supporters.? I guess if you think the phones are free, so will everything else.? Gimme girls, anyone?
    ?
    No wonder they timed the start of this program to “conveniently” occur after the election.



  2. sammy22 on June 28, 2013 at 12:28 pm

    If we are inexorably going to a single-payer system, we have been wasting a lot of time, money and effort already.



  3. kateinmaine on June 28, 2013 at 5:38 pm

    if we can’t afford o’care, we can’t afford single-payer.? price of healthcare has escalated in quantum leaps since gov’t started inserting itself through regulation.? think it’s ever going down?? right–and you think taxes are temporary, too.? what do the simple folk do?? we’ll see, won’t we. . .



    • sammy22 on June 28, 2013 at 5:51 pm

      ?I guess you’ve not heard of Medicare yet.



    • kateinmaine on June 29, 2013 at 12:50 pm

      wow, smugness.? over another bankrupt, unaffordable, failing gov’t program that has damaged healthcare/delivery through regulation, bureaucracy and corruption.? audacity, thy name is sammy–obama’s bruddah from anuddah muddah, onaccounta he got no daddy.



  4. sammy22 on June 29, 2013 at 4:33 pm

    Wow. Over-the-top, kateinmaine. Even Paul Ryan would leave Medicare alone until 2024. Then replace it with Medicare with premium support. So what is the “other” plan. No need to hurl insults.



    • Dimsdale on July 1, 2013 at 7:21 pm

      Would this be the Medicare that the “Affordable” Care Act has already rifled through for cash, or the one that physicians are dropping due to unrealistic compensation?



    • sammy22 on July 1, 2013 at 10:53 pm

      I don’t know. Maybe Paul Ryan knows.



    • Dimsdale on July 2, 2013 at 8:10 am

      Maybe your friends in the media and Democrat party would know.? They are the ones dictating that we can’t fix or stanch the blood loss in the program.? ?bamacare will just exacerbate the problem by building on it.



    • Lynn on July 2, 2013 at 8:09 am

      Paul Ryan knows and he says and the President just mocks him and the President goes on his blundering way. Revamping our Healthcare system should have been bipartisan with input from doctors, hospitals, health administrators, & health insurance companies and not a free give away for politicians to cement their “jobs”. Slowly but surely the fawning guilt ridden electorate are ?realizing that ?Obamacares only for himself.



    • sammy22 on July 2, 2013 at 10:54 am

      Obamacare is SCOTUS approved, Obama cannot run again, Ryan’s plan has no chance of getting anywhere, so what do Repubs have to serve up? Or is complaining the only thing that keeps this subject running?



    • Steve McGough on July 3, 2013 at 8:12 am

      Continuing to ignore plans that were brought forward in Congress by Republicans in 2009 is annoying. (Just one is here.) They have also continued to attempt to reverse the legislation. This is not about Obama running again, it’s about the federal government reaching in and destroying the health care system. You want us to roll over and take it, we will not do that. We’ve been pointing out these problems for years and you and many others said it was all politically made up BS. It’s not, and you know it.



    • Dimsdale on July 4, 2013 at 8:56 am

      The technicalities in the wording (penalties as a tax) was “approved”, not the content of the law itself.?? The way ?bamacare is imploding under the weight of its own incompetence (i.e. people are realizing what is in it, as Pelosi says), give life to all the “complaining”.?? Maybe a favorable outcome in the 2014 elections might do some good too, although, as you know, they had to kick the “football of pain” down the road once again to avoid having the “complainers” (a plurality or a majority of Americans, depending on how you poll it) yanking this political weed out by the roots.
      ?
      Face it: if ?bamacare was as good as they pretend, they wouldn’t have to have been so deceptive in its passage.? And its execution….



    • kateinmaine on July 4, 2013 at 9:33 am

      i believe truth and insult are mutually exclusive.? although truth can hurt–must be that odd sensation you are experiencing.



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