Nearly 50 million Americans have gained health insurance through Obamacare over the past decade, the White House announced on Tuesday. Since 2014, one in seven Americans have taken advantage of the program, which was enacted in 2010 and allows people to buy affordable health insurance that they couldn’t get through a job or government-subsidized programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
“Today, the ACA markets are part of the fabric of America’s health care system and a key reason our nation has maintained historic levels of insurance coverage,” White House domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden said during a briefing on the milestone.
In February 2024, ACA enrollment hit a record high of 20.8 million. In 2023, 16.2 million people had active ACA insurance.
The number of ACA enrollments was at its highest in 2014, when the ACA’s health insurance marketplaces were rolled out to all states, but a new report from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis shows that ACA enrollment has increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing even more dramatically after the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 expanded tax credits for program enrollees, and then increasing again in 2022 after the passage of the Inflation Control Act extended the tax credits.
Tanden noted that under the Biden-Harris administration, ACA premiums have fallen by $800 per person per year.
The Treasury Department’s analysis compared ACA enrollment data from the Department of Health and Human Services with data from the Internal Revenue Service to see how many people had applied for coverage on their tax returns, even if only for a few months between jobs. They found that 49.4 million Americans, or 14% of the population, had enrolled in the ACA over the past decade.
“Before the ACA went into effect in 2009, Treasury researchers published an analysis looking at long-term changes in health insurance and projected that the number of Americans who would benefit from the ACA’s insurance options over a 10-year period would be much larger than the number who would benefit at any one point in time,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, Treasury’s acting assistant secretary for tax policy. “And as it turns out, that’s exactly what we’re finding now.”
Alon Dine noted that health insurance marketplace utilization is higher in states that haven’t adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion, available since 2014, or that have only recently adopted it. In Florida, Utah and Georgia, at least 20% of the population has ACA health insurance marketplace coverage.
She said the new data is “further evidence that the ACA marketplaces work, contributing to health and economic stability and enabling people to purchase comprehensive, affordable health insurance, especially when they may not have access to other insurance in the short or long term.”
