May 2014 | Joel C. Cantor | Opinion: New Scorecard Shows Room to Improve Healthcare in New Jersey
In recent months, health policy watchers have focused mostly on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The ACA’s technical problems deserve to rank high in the pantheon of public administration debacles, but most analysts agree that in the end, the ACA’s 2014 coverage expansions have met or even exceeded expectations.
The numbers are starting to come in. According to the Health Reform Monitoring Survey, a quarterly tracking survey by the Urban Institute, the number of non-elderly uninsured adults nationally fell by nearly three percentage point by early March, with about a month to go in open enrollment. The best news in the HRMS is that the uninsured gap closed the most for young adults, the poor, and racial minorities — all groups with high uninsured rates before reform.