FRIDAY, April 18, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Eight million Americans signed up for private health insurance during the just-concluded first enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act, the White House announced Thursday afternoon.
An estimated 35 percent of those who signed up are younger than 35, and 28 percent are between 18 and 34 years of age. Those numbers are very close to the first-year enrollment numbers Massachusetts saw when it introduced its health reform legislation in 2006, the White House said in a news release.
Younger adults' participation in the Affordable Care Act is considered crucial because they tend to be healthy and their insurance premiums are designed to offset the costs of medical treatment of older, sicker people. The rising cost of health care also has slowed to the lowest rate on record, Obama administration officials said Thursday.
Since the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010, per capita health care spending is "estimated to have grown at the lowest rate on record for any three-year period and less than one-third the long-term historical average stretching back to 1960," the news release said. "This thing [the Affordable Care Act] is working," President Barack Obama said Thursday afternoon during a press briefing at the White House.
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