It was an ugly, ugly bedroom. The only solution I could think of was to scrape off the seven layers of paint and wallpaper to get back to the original plaster. At that point we would be able to make the room ready for my daughter. It was the spring of 1983 and I was living in University Heights. The work was backbreaking and monotonous. Success was measured in inches. “Surely there must be a better way of doing this”, was muttered on an hourly basis. I even wondered if it would have been easier to just knock out the walls and hang new Sheetrock. But we persevered because we knew why we were doing this. We were doing this for Jenny.
Is the effort worth it? Are our goals worthy of the time and effort it might take to achieve them? That question pops up again and again when we look at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). We were told that there were 50,000,000 uninsured Americans and that the PPACA would solve this problem. We were told that the cost of insurance and the actual cost of healthcare would decrease. We were promised easy access to affordable care.
Are we there yet?
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According to the Gallup Pole published in March 2014, the number of uninsured in the United States has decreased. Of course, that number has steadily INCREASED until it peaked in the middle of last year. But now it is going down. Gallup conducted more than 28,000 interviews and has determined that 15.9% of all Americans are uninsured. With a US Population of Approximately 318,000,000, that would mean that about 50,562,000 of us are uninsured. For comparison sake, the uninsured rate was in the 14% range until the crash at the end of 2008 and did not exceed 17% until the middle of 2011.
It might be fair to ask if the new law is really having any impact on the number of uninsureds. Is the economy, slowly recovering, the reason more people are now getting coverage? Or it could be the expansion of Medicaid in those states that chose to fully cover the working poor. It is way too early to tell. The numbers released so far, rounded to the nearest hundred thousand or so, are neither firm nor reliable.