Health & Fitness
Obamacare Lives: Every County In Nation Now Has An ACA-Compliant Insurer
Republicans continue to say Obamacare is imploding, but its prospects are looking better now than they were a few months ago.
COLUMBUS, OH — According to President Trump and his allies, Obamacare is dying. Dead. Imploding. But now, one of the GOP's favorite talking points against the despised Democratic law has been considerably weakened. Ohio's insurance department confirmed Thursday that the lone county in the nation at risk of going without an insurer to offer care under the federal health law has landed a provider.
The department announced Thursday that CareSource will provide health insurance coverage in Paulding County next year. (For more local news, subscribe to the Columbus Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts. For more political stories, subscribe to the White House Patch.)
Just three days earlier, House Speaker Paul Ryan said during a CNN town hall, "Obamacare is not working." He added: "We've got dozens of counties around America that have zero insurers left."
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That wasn't even accurate when he said it. The Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on the same day that identified Paulding, in northwest Ohio just south of Toledo, as the final county at risk of lacking a provider when 2018 signups for insurance companies begin Nov. 1.
Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich has helped spearhead bipartisan efforts aimed at stabilizing insurance markets.
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Earlier this year, well over 40 mostly rural counties faced the prospect of having no options for exchanges created under President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act.
Insurers who withdrew cited steep losses and uncertainty over the future of the Affordable Care Act.
The ideal situation Obamacare's designers had in mind, though, was not a single insurer for each county. In theory, insurers would compete against each other in every county to help drive down the price of coverage. In many places, that is not happening, and concerns persist about the ever-rising cost of health insurance.
As this chart from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows, 47 percent of counties only have one insurance plan on offer on the Obamacare marketplace:
See Also: The Entire US Will Have Obamacare Coverage In 2018 But It May Not Last
Cody Fenwick contributed to this report.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images