State officials who are on the front-lines of implementing the federal “Affordable Care Act” say more than 61,000 Iowans now have health care coverage through the plans offered on the state-run insurance exchange. Legislators want to know how many uninsured Iowans have signed up for the coverage, but State Insurance Commissioner Nick Gerhart says they don’t know.
“We could look for a way to see if we could track that data,” he told legislators Tuesday.
However, the sign-up process does not ask those who get health insurance through the state-run “insurance exchange” whether they’ve been uninsured. All but 11-thousand of those who’ve signed up for coverage had been enrolled in a state program for low-income Iowans who could not afford private insurance. That program ended December 31 and the new, so-called “ObamaCare” policies went into effect January 1 for those who signed up before the December deadline.