By PNHP
1. Number of Americans who lack any health coverage still exceeds 50 million, although perhaps 1 million children up to age 26 are now covered on their parents’ policies, and up to 70,000 are covered because of the ban on pre-existing condition exclusions for children.
2. Over 45,000 excess deaths annually due to lack of health insurance.
3. Over 40 million Americans, including over 10 million children, are underinsured. Although insurers can no longer rescind policies and must raise the cap on lifetime benefits to $750,000, over 900 plans and 4 states (affecting 2.4 million people) have been exempted from the cap, and insurers can still rescind policies for alleged “fraud” (which they claim in the majority of cases already).
4. Perhaps 12,000 people have gained coverage in new state high risk pools, not the 325,000 expected.
5. Seniors get a 50 percent discount on brand name drugs in the donut hole as well as some key preventive services without cost-sharing, such as an annual physical.
6. The bill has not reduced medical inflation or bankruptcies due to medical costs (although medical inflation slowed the year before the bill passed to its lowest rate of increase in five decades due to the recession). Data from Massachusetts indicate that even when the federal health law is fully implemented it is unlikely to have much impact on medical costs and medical bankruptcy, which affects over 1 million families annually.
7. On the bright side, debate over the Obama plan opens up some space for ongoing national debate over health reform (compared to the decade of silence after the defeat of the Clinton plan) that we can take advantage of, such as the upcoming one year anniversary of the planās passage. As the plan fails to have much impact, more people acknowledge that we do really need single payer.
Jacob Hacker had a useful chart in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/17/opinion/20110217_oped.html