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August 22, 2016 at 01:43 PM
Many of the remaining long-term uninsured people in California say they are broke, and some may have trouble buying health coverage because they cannot document that they are in the United States legally.
But some may need help from a persistent health insurance agent or broker.
Analysts at the Menlo Park, California-based Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation have raised that possibility in a summary of results from the fourth wave of their open enrollment period survey. The latest wave of interviews was conducted from February through June.
The foundation organized the first wave in 2013, before the start of the first Affordable Care Act individual major medical coverage open enrollment period. They polled 2,001 nonelderly, uninsured adult residents of California. Survey teams have returned and re-interviewed as many of the same people as they could find every year since then.
During the latest survey wave, about 72 percent of all of the participants, and 78 percent of the participants who were eligible for the ACA public exchange program or the ACA Medicaid expansion program, said they had coverage, Kaiser analysts report.
Related: High-income Americans get covered
About 26 percent of the participants who were still uninsured said they had recently tried to get insured, but that insurance appeared to be too expensive.
Another 61 percent said they had not tried to get coverage.
It appears that many of those people had not tried to determine whether they were eligible for either Medicaid or ACA exchange plan premium subsidies, because just 40 percent of all the uninsured said they looked into Medicaid eligibility in the past two years, and just 31 percent had looked into getting premium tax credit subsidies.
When the survey team asked the people who were still uninsured how much they would be willing to pay each month for self-only coverage, 26 percent said $49 or less, but 41 percent said they could pay $50 to $199 per month.
