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A new Gallup poll shows the uninsured rate fell to 13.4 percent in April – the lowest rate since the polling organization began tracking health insurance coverage in 2008.
The new polling data suggests that both the health care law – and the recovering economy – are having a pretty significant effect on the number of Americans with insurance coverage.
The gains of insurance coverage have been especially large among lower-income Americans – the people who qualify for Medicaid or insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. There's been a 5.2 percentage-point drop in the uninsured rate, for Americans who have a household income lower than $36,000 since the end of 2013.
Minorities and younger Americans have also seen steeper declines; the uninsured rate for African Americans has fallen by 7.7 percentage-points over the last four months.
There are lots of metrics to measure the health care law on: whether its helping to bend the cost curve, for example, or if people can see the doctor once they gain a health insurance plan. But if we're just looking at the metric of whether more people have health insurance coverage – which is one key goal of the health care law – the answer seems to be pretty certainly yes.
