Because of the health care law, young adults can stay on their parents’ insurance plans through age 26. This policy took effect in September 2010. Data from the National Health Interview Survey shows that since September 2010, the percentage of adults aged 19-25 covered by a private health insurance plan increased significantly, with approximately 2.5 million more young adults with insurance coverage compared to the number of young adults who would have been insured without the law.

In Southern states, including Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, this means about 900,000 more young adults are covered by health insurance because of the law.

“Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, 2.5 million more young adults don’t have to live with the fear and uncertainty of going without health insurance,” said Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Moms and dads around the country can breathe a little easier knowing their children are covered.”

Data from the first three months of 2011 showed that one million more young adults had insurance coverage compared to a year ago. The numbers show a continuation of the coverage gains due to the health care law as students graduate from high school and college in May and June and otherwise would have lost coverage.

The data are consistent with estimates from surveys released earlier in the year. Those surveys have shown an increase in the number and percentage of young adults 19 to 25 with health insurance coverage. Specifically, the Census Bureau and the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index Survey, as well as the NHIS release of data through March 2011, reported similar trends through early 2011.

The results show that the initial gains from the health care law have continued to grow.

“The data announced today show that, because of the health care law, there is a continued and consistent pattern of improved health coverage among young adults,” said Sherry Glied, Ph.D., HHS assistant secretary for planning and evaluation. “The Affordable Care Act has helped literally millions of young adults get the health insurance they need so they can begin their careers with the peace of mind that they’re covered.”

Reacting to the news, Health Care for America Now said this is yet another example of how the health care law is making a huge difference in the lives of America’s families.

“Just last week we learned that the law has already saved 2.7 million seniors $1.5 billion on their prescription drugs and delivered preventive medical services to 24 million Medicare enrollees at no out-of-pocket cost to them,” Executive Director Ethan Rome said. “That’s why it’s just plain wrong that the Republicans, their corporate sponsors and other right-wing extremists are trying to take away these benefits and rights.”

This is a fight about core values, about whether we want a country where people are left to fend for themselves or one where they can count on Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to provide health security and peace of mind to working families, he said. “We must stand strong to fight off the GOP’s hyper-partisan attacks on health laws that are making the country a healthier, fairer place.”

Angered by the “Let Him Die” chant at the Tea Party debate Monday evening, Keith Olbermann and former congressman Alan Grayson discuss the appropriate response to this outrage. Grayson questions the Tea Party’s Christian ideology, saying, “They glorify and sanctify other people’s pain.”

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Only in America, a country founded on the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is there a statistical measure of “well-being” where highly paid social scientists spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out just how happy we are as a people.

Unfortunately, we don’t have data from July 4, 1776 to gauge how we compare with our ancestors on that score. There were no pollsters in those days, and only a few newspapers and a primitive voting system to gauge public opinion.

There are some important lessons to be drawn from such measures of public opinion, however, if you look deeper than the basic numbers.

It should come as no real shock that the happiest people in the happiest state in the country live in Hawaii, a dreamy set of tropical islands where the climate is wonderful all year around, the unemployment rate is only 6.3 percent (compared to 8.9 percent nationally) and only 8 percent of the population is uninsured (compared to 17 percent nationally).

According to the latest Gallup well being scores, the people of Hawaii expressed the highest wellbeing among states with a score of 71 out of 100.

It is sort of sad, when you think about it, that even in the happiest state of them all, the score is only a C on any standard academic report card. The country as a whole only averages a D score of 66 percent on Gallup’s well-being index.

Was there ever a time when the country was closer to being 100 percent happy? Maybe in the 1960s or the 1990s, times when the economy was booming and the future looked bright? Unfortunately, Gallup was not conducting these polls then, so we will never know.

As I sit here sipping my coffee and pouring over the data this Sunday morning, I’m wondering what it would take to improve these scores? There are some clues in the numbers. More on that in the end.

What we know now is that people seem happiest in Hawaii, Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Colorado, Minnesota, South Dakota, Utah, Connecticut, Nebraska and Massachusetts, the top 10 states, while the saddest people live mostly in the South, in West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Louisiana, along with the states that round out the bottom 10 states, Ohio, Delaware, Nevada and Michigan.

“Ten Southern states have a Well-Being Index score that puts them in the lower range wellbeing group. There are also more states in the South with wellbeing scores in the lower range than there are throughout the rest of the country,” Gallup concludes. “Nevada, which is influenced by the poor wellbeing in Las Vegas, is the only Western state with a lower range wellbeing score.”

Hawaii placed first in wellbeing in part because people scored it high in the categories of “life evaluation, emotional health and physical health,” according to Gallup. “West Virginia took last place in wellbeing because of the opposite: The state was the worst performing on the same three sub-indexes. Delaware residents continue to report the worst work environments in the country, while those living in South Dakota are the most positive about their work situations.”

Vermont still boasts the best overall health habits in America, and Kentucky continues to have the worst, according to Gallup. While Massachusetts residents have the best access to necessities crucial to high wellbeing, “Mississippi residents again have the worst,” according to Gallup, “with a score on this index even lower than it was in 2009.”

Gallup’s Bottom Line

“Improving wellbeing scores will be a challenge for leaders as many states have been facing and continue to encounter significant fiscal problems, including having to close public schools, lay off or cut salaries of public workers, and cut back on public services — all of which have the potential to affect different aspects of wellbeing,” Gallup concludes. “Although money is tight, finding ways to increase residents’ access to good jobs and to basic necessities — including medical care in particular — and decrease costly, chronic conditions such as obesity and diabetes will be the most likely means to improve wellbeing.”

At a time when state and local governments are challenged with being able to provide basic services, Gallup strangely suggests that “business leaders may be able to step in and play an important role in increasing wellbeing in their communities, which is good for business,” since the polling outfit concludes that “higher wellbeing means lower healthcare costs and greater economic growth.”

Further Analysis

While Gallup’s analysis reveals a tinge of anti-government bias, not unlike the population it measures, realists understand that the government has an important role to play both in investing to improve the economy and in taking up the slack in health care where private, for-profit corporations seem more intent on maximizing profits and CEO pay than helping the country and its people to be healthier and happier.

Gallup’s State of the States series reveals state-by-state differences on political and economic trends that effect wellbeing, and at a glance, it becomes clear that some of the more conservative or “red” states in the country are also some of the most unhappy.

So, what can be done to make the country a happier place? Two things seem obvious. Provide people with health care and improve the economy.

Remember, President Barack Obama is from Hawaii (not Kenya, as Southern Baptist preacher and presidential wannabe Mike Huckabee said on talk radio this week). So maybe the implementation of “Obamacare” would be a good thing for the nation’s happiness, not a bad thing, as all those conservative Republicans in the U.S. House and governor’s offices in some parts of the country would have you believe.

Then, as any respectable economist knows, the government is the lender and spender of last resort. So if government spending were focused in the right kinds of activities, like say the Civilian Conservation Corps or the Peace Corps, we might could get that measure of happiness moving up again.

The only reason we are even discussing the deficit now is because of the tea party movement, which is intent on destroying American happiness to discredit a Democratic president and get more conservative, Christian and/or corporate Republicans elected.

Let me suggest one other measure that would help improve our nation’s happiness. Rather than attacking workers unions in this country, as Republican governor’s are doing now in a number of states, perhaps unions should begin trying to increase their role in American life.

Union members tend to have higher wages and better health care coverage than non-union workers, so would it not behoove us to strengthen unions rather than working to gut them?

While we don’t have enough public opinion data to accurately measure this, it is not hard to imagine that the country was happier overall in the 1950s, when union membership reached its peak in this country.

There is a lot of nostalgia still for the 1950s, when America was strong in the wake of the Allied victory in World War II when we even went through a massive Baby Boom. Do you think when more people are having sex and conceiving children that might be a good indicator of the health and happiness of a country?

Think about it.

About the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index

These state-level data are based on daily surveys conducted from January through December 2010. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 100 represents ideal wellbeing. Well-Being Index scores among states vary by a narrow range of 9.3 points. The Well-Being Index score for the nation was 66.8 in 2010.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index tracks U.S. wellbeing and provides best-in-class solutions for a healthier world. To learn more, please visit well-beingindex.com.

To view and export trend data and for more information on each of the six Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index sub-indexes, please see the following charts: Well-Being Index, Life Evaluation Index, Emotional Health Index, Physical Health Index, Healthy Behavior Index, Work Environment Index, and Basic Access Index.

The Work Environment Index, one of six sub-components of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, includes four items: job satisfaction, ability to use one’s strengths at work, supervisor’s treatment (more like a boss or a partner), and is it an open and trusting work environment.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2010, with a random sample of 352,840 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1 percentage point.

The House Republicans seem to be saying yes. Apparently, taking away women’s access to reproductive health services is an important way to create jobs and get the economy moving again.

That may explain the urgency of Rep. Mike Pence’s disgraceful legislation to defund Planned Parenthood and other providers by stripping them of Title X family-planning funding, since creating jobs is the stated priority of the Republicans in Congress. The Republicans also want to take away the new cost-savings and consumer protections in the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, because this too will apparently create jobs.

This is the same GOP that wants to undermine the new law, including re-opening the abortion compromise that unambiguously maintained the prohibition against federal funds paying for abortions. This is all so important to the Republicans that they made one of the bills relating to this issue H.R. 3, among the very first taken up by the House in the 112th Congress. No wonder people are asking Speaker John Boehner, “When are the jobs?”

The GOP is gripped by two obsessions — rolling back the clock on women’s health services and giving control of our health care back to the insurance companies. They want to take us back to the days when insurance companies could deny your care because you have a “pre-existing condition,” drop you for getting sick and jack up your rates whenever they feel like it. They want to return to the time when being a woman was a pre-existing condition. They want to entirely eliminate family planning funds. When it comes to health care in general and women’s health in particular, the Republicans don’t have a legislative agenda to move forward – just a fixation on tearing things down and moving backwards.

Meanwhile, the Republicans aren’t doing a single thing to create jobs. They’re too busy trying to put the insurance companies back in charge of our health care. They’re too busy going after vital health care institutions like Planned Parenthood. They’re too busy trying to get between a woman and her doctor.

That is especially galling because the insurance companies have made decisions about our health care for decades. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, those days are over. Now the House Republicans want to be the ones making those decisions for women. This is nothing short of a war on women and their health care. And it’s happening in state capitals as well as Washington, D.C.

This hypocrisy is extreme, even by the standards the Republicans have set since taking control of the House. Take Speaker Boehner’s less-than-authentic comments on the matter of the President’s religion and birthplace. He has said again and again that he doesn’t want to tell the American people “what to think” — or tell members of his own caucus to stop lying about these basic matters of fact.

The Speaker’s line is offensive — a transparent wink and a nod to those who continue spreading lies about President Obama to intentionally stoke the flames of the far right.

If Boehner is not willing to “tell people what to think” about something so important and basic as the legitimacy of the president of the United States, why is it okay to tell women and their doctors what to do?
Seriously, enough already.

“For too long, skyrocketing health care costs have made it hard for businesses to provide coverage for employees and have made it difficult for families to afford coverage,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. “The report shows that the health care law will bring major savings for families as it begins to take shape. Without the Affordable Care Act, consumers and businesses would face higher premiums, fewer insurance choices, and rapidly rising health care costs.”

From 1999 to 2009, premiums more than doubled, rising by more than $7,500 for the average family that gets insurance through an employer. The high cost of health care made it difficult for many small businesses to offer insurance to their workers. The percentage of small employers offering health insurance dropped from 65 percent to 59 percent between 1999 and 2009.

The report finds that, compared to what they would have paid without the law:

* Middle-class families purchasing private insurance in the new State-based Health Insurance Exchanges could save as much as $2,300 per year in 2014.

* Tax credits provided by the Affordable Care Act will lead to even greater savings. For example, in 2014, a family of four with an income of $33,525 could save as much as $14,900 per year since they also will qualify for tax credits and reduced cost sharing.

* In 2014, small businesses, on average, could save up to $350 per family policy and many may be eligible for tax credits of up to 50 percent of their premiums.

* The tax credits are already available to small businesses and cover 35 percent of their premiums. For example, a firm with 10 workers who earn an average of $20,000 annually could currently receive credits of $35,000 annually. These tax credits could save small businesses $6 billion in 2010 and 2011.

* All businesses will likely see lower premiums of $2,000 per family by 2019, which could generate millions of dollars in savings.

Congressional and state Republican lawmakers have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Earlier this month, the new House majority passed a repeal bill and several states attorneys general have filed suits against the new health care reform law. If those attempts are successful, Sebelius says, families and small business owners will be hard hit in the pocketbook by higher premiums and other health care costs.

“We can’t afford to go back to the days when uncontrollably rising costs put a bigger and bigger burden on family budgets and business balance sheets,” according to a spokesperson for the AFO-CIO.