Taking a pulse: a look at the Affordable Care Act's impact across Utah.

AuthorPenrod, Emma
PositionFocus

After listening to endless complaints from residents and businesses alike, experts didn't really expect large numbers of Utahns to sign up for the Affordable Care Act. But when the marketplace opened for the first time last year, Utah residents signed up for insurance in droves, with some demographics signing up faster than their counterparts in many other states. And with tens of thousands of Utahns still without insurance, those same experts who once predicted a low adoption rate in Utah now anticipate a big year for insurance enrollment in 2015--even though they say the act still has a lot of challenges to overcome.

By the Numbers

Nearly 85,0000 Utahns signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act's online insurance marketplace in its first year--30,000 more than state experts initially anticipated, says Jason Stevenson, education and communication director for the Utah Health Policy Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group dedicated to sustainable healthcare.

"We weren't sure there would be a demand for this in Utah," Stevenson says, because so many Utahns get health insurance coverage through their employers--almost 60 percent of Utah residents have employer-provided health insurance, compared to a national average of just under 50 percent. "But demand was huge," says Stevenson. Indeed, 84,601 Utahns had signed up for health insurance through healthcare.gov by April 19, 2014. Nearly 45,000 of them signed up in the last month before the extended ACA deadline.

Who signed up for healthcare was perhaps just as surprising as how many signed up. It wasn't the elderly or individuals with pre-existing conditions who clamored for coverage--though there were those, too, says Randal Serr, director of Take Care Utah, an online educational organization run under the Utah Health Policy Project.

Serr says he was aware of at least one enrollee, in her 30s, who had been previously denied health coverage because of a pre-existing brain tumor. Her condition had rendered her unable to work, and her lack of insurance and income made it impossible for her to seek medical treatment. But after enrolling under the Affordable Care Act, the woman was able to have the tumor successfully removed, and she was able to return to work once again, Serr says.

But for the most part, younger Utahns made up the bulk of the new enrollees through the marketplace, and many of those young enrollees were self-employed or otherwise engaged in some form of nontraditional...

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