The Story:
Through remarkable political circumstances, the basic ‘Obamacare’ system, a system of state-by-state marketplaces designed to make health insurance affordable to as many people as possible, outlasted the Trump presidency. The US Supreme Court has chipped away at aspects of this system, but it has upheld the heart of it. Aside from its appeals to the high court, the previous administration sought legislation that would repeal Obamacare outright. Yet even when the Republican Party was in the majority in both houses of Congress during the first two years of the Trump term, this effort failed.
A new study:
A new study indicates that partisan polarization may have had an impact on who does and doesn’t benefit from the exchanges and the subsidies available through them. It found that Republicans who bought individual plans are less likely than others to have shopped for it through the online marketplaces and accordingly are less likely to have benefited from the subsidies available that way.
In Pill Form:
But polarization has not harmed the program’s goals in a grave way. The same study showed, for example, that there was no difference in subsidy take-up among people in the lowest income groups (those with less than 250% of the federal poverty level) Republican or Democrat.
