Open enrollment for Covered California just closed and one question for the state’s health insurance marketplace is what happened to the 3.8 million people who were still uninsured in 2015. Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, said Feb. 4 that there were more than 425,000 new enrollees this year.
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, nearly half of those Californians uninsured at the start of 2015 weren’t eligible for financial assistance in purchasing coverage. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is an editorially independent program of the Foundation.) This largest group of the remaining uninsured includes people in a range circumstances including:
- undocumented immigrants
- people who make too much money to qualify for assistance
- people who declined an offer of insurance from an employer.
Under the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, 37 percent of California’s uninsured were eligible for the program’s assistance. An additional 16 percent were eligible for a tax credit after enrolling.