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Health Law Means Fewer Young Adults Go Without Insurance

By Janet Adamy
September 21, 2011, 1:55 PM ET

Here’s a bit of good news for President Barack Obama’s health law: it’s helping drive down the uninsured rate among young adults.

Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [ http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/insur201109.pdf ] show that in the first quarter of 2011, the percentage of adults between ages 19 and 25 without health insurance fell 3.5 percentage points to 30.4%. That translates to about an additional one million people that got coverage from the previous year.

It’s the third survey in recent weeks to credit a piece of the health law with giving more young adults insurance (Census Bureau data [ http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf ] and a Gallup poll [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/149558/Significantly-Fewer-Year-Olds-Uninsured.aspx ] were the other sources). Researchers say the cause is a provision that, starting last year, allowed young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance plan until their 26th birthday.

The question now is whether incremental benefits from the law like this can boost its overhaul’s popularity in advance of the 2012 elections. Although Republicans have blamed the law for killing jobs and raising taxes, very little of its sweeping policy changes have actually taken effect. The biggest ones–the requirement to buy insurance and the federal subsidies to expand coverage–don’t begin until 2014.

And the new stats raise a tricky question for Republicans: would they peel back a popular provision like this if they retook the White House? All the GOP presidential candidates have vowed to repeal the health overhaul if they win. But Americans may chafe if that means their post-college kids, struggling to find work in a weak economy, get booted from their health plan.

Copyright ©2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/09/21/health-law-means-fewer-young-adults-go-without-insurance/ [with comments]

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