Uninsured rate drops due to health care law, but signups lag among Hispanics

A bodega worker receives free care during a health clinic in the Bronx in 2010. Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images

With just three weeks left to enroll on the new insurance exchanges, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, finds that 15.9 percent of U.S. adults are uninsured thus far in 2014, down from 17.1 percent for the last three months or calendar quarter of 2013.

Released Monday, the survey based on more than 28,000 interviews is a major independent effort to track the health care rollout. The drop of 1.2 percentage points in the uninsured rate translates to about 3 million people gaining coverage.

Gallup said the proportion of Americans who are uninsured is on track to drop to the lowest quarterly level it measured since 2008, before Obama took office.

Its probably a reasonable hypothesis that the Affordable Care Act is having something to do with this drop, said Frank Newport, Gallups editor-in-chief. We saw a continuation of the trend we saw last month; it didnt bounce back up.

The survey found that almost every major demographic group made progress getting health insurance, although Hispanics lagged.

With the highest uninsured rate of any racial or ethnic group, Latinos were expected to be major beneficiaries of the new health care law. They are a relatively young population and many are on the lower rungs of the middle class, in jobs that dont come with health insurance. Theyve also gone big for Obama in his two presidential campaigns.

But the administrations outreach effort to Hispanics stumbled from the start. The Spanish-language enrollment website, CuidadodeSalud.gov, was delayed due to technical problems. Its name sounds like a clunky translation from English: Care of Health.

The feds also translated Affordable Care Act as Law for Care of Health at Low Price which doesnt sound too appealing.

A spot check of the Spanish site on Monday showed parts of it still use a mix of Spanish and English to convey information on such basics as insurance copays, risking confusion.

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Uninsured rate drops due to health care law, but signups lag among Hispanics

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