7 Charts that show that Obamacare worked in getting health care to people and saving money.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obamacare-charts-20170104-story.html

Congressional Republicans, evidently hoping that by repeating an untruth they’ll convince American voters, and perhaps themselves, that it’s a truth, on Wednesday said the Affordable Care Act has “failed.”

The undistilled version of this view came from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who emerged Wednesday from a meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence to assert: “This law has failed. Americans are struggling. The law is failing while we speak. … Things are only getting worse under Obamacare. … The healthcare system has been ruined — dismantled — under Obamacare.”

Every one of those statements is demonstrably untrue. How do we know this? We know because every measure of healthcare spending, access and cost has improved since the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act.Timothy McBride of Washington University in St. Louis has done the heavy lifting of pulling together the relevant charts and graphs, and posting them online in a series of 12 tweets compiled on Storify. We’ve culled some of the most important, and present them here.

We should add, first, that Ryan also pledged, once the GOP repeals the law, to “make sure that there is a stable transition to a truly patient-centered system. We want every American to have access to quality, affordable health coverage”

This is nothing but fatuous gobbledygook. The GOP has had six years to come up with an alternative plan, and never has done so. Its current strategy is to repeal the Affordable Care Act now, and then cook up a replacement sometime in the next two, three, even four years. (They can’t even agree on a time frame.) What exactly is a “patient-centered system,” anyway?

Here are the charts, courtesy of professor McBride.  

First, the overall uninsured rate has come sharply down since the advent of Obamacare:

The uninsured rate for non-elderly adults fell from nearly 16% in 2010 to less than 10%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's now at a historic low.

The decline in uninsured rates was especially pronounced among lower-income Americans, according to the Council of Economic Advisors and other sources:

Uninsured rates fell by more than 10 percentage points among the poorest Americans eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act — those earning less than 138% of the federal poverty line.

Although Republicans claim that even if the Affordable Care Act brought down the uninsured rate, its enrollees had trouble seeing a doctor, that isn’t true. Numerous studies debunk claims that doctors shun Affordable Care Act enrollees. This sample by the Council of Economic Advisors shows that the decline in the uninsured rate is closely associated with a reduction in people who were prevented from seeking and finding medical care because of its cost:

Hospitals are major beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act, as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Council of Economic Advisors report. Hospitals’ uncompensated care costs fell sharply in Medicaid expansion states, as patients treated as indigent in the past are now covered by Medicaid. Their uncompensated care costs fell from an average 4% of operating costs before the Affordable Care Act to less than 2% afterward, a decline worth tens of billions of dollars nationwide.

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