Not all bad

 Whenever there's a bit of good news on the economic justice front, admittedly not an everyday occurrence, I try to notice it. Here's the latest:

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS for short) a record number of Americans now receive health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA)...and what a fight it was to enact and protect it all these years. Specifically, more than 35 million people are either covered through the health exchange or marketplace, expanded Medicaid (21 million in states that expanded Medicaid as WV did in 2013), or basic coverage.

That's more than one out of ten Americans in a total population of around 332+ million. It's an even bigger achievement when we factor in who got that coverage. The US health care system does a pretty good job of covering the elderly via Medicare. Close to 95 percent of children are covered via CHIP, traditional Medicaid or their parents' insurance. Low income people with disabilities are likewise often covered by traditional Medicaid. Those covered by the ACA, on the other hand, are working age adults not eligible for other kinds of insurance--and those most likely to lack coverage before the ACA. 

The percent of uninsured Americans is now at an all time low of around 8.8 percent. Still too many by far, but it shows the benefits of this signature legislation of the Obama administration. And a lot of people in West Virginia worked hard to make that happen here. I hope the 12 holdout states--Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming--see the light and expand Medicaid soon (did anyone else notice that eight of those were also part of the Confederacy?). I know lots of people in those states are working on it. 

This may not last forever the way things are going, but I'll celebrate this for now anyway.