This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 28th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

We're a few years into the consequences of the Affordable Care Act, so what are they? Do higher rates of health

insurance coverage justify the law? And what should repeal or repeal and

replace actually look like? Aaron Yellowwitz is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. We spoke

this week in Lexington, Kentucky. The statistic that is often the lead in almost

every news story about the Affordable Care Act is how many millions of people now have health

insurance who did not have it before the Affordable Care Act.

Can you break out what that statistic, one, what does it technically mean and what is it meant to convey?

There are a couple things. First off, Obamacare, where the Affordable Care Act extended health insurance in a number of ways.

It gave health insurance to young adults under age 26 who had parents who were working and the interesting thing about that was that regardless of whether you were dependent or not or married or not you could still get health insurance under your parents plan.

That happened a while ago. That happened in 2010. The more substantive

changes happened in 2014. 2014 where we remember the kind of rocky start to the health care exchanges basically entailed

in about half of the states a large Medicaid expansion up until 138% of the poverty line. And then for those who had incomes

up to about $95,000 if you were a family of four could get subsidized coverage

from the health care marketplace, either a state-run one or the federal one.

So basically there was a giant expansion in health insurance coverage.

About half the gains, more or less came from Medicaid, about

half the gains came from private coverage. In the states where they didn't expand Medicaid,

it obviously came much more from what we would call private coverage even though there were large taxpayer

subsidy.

And the number out there, 20 million gained over the last couple of years is correct.

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