Five years after the Affordable Care Act began offering new insurance options to millions of Americans, Bloomberg decided to launch a deep examination of how effective it had been in covering people, and trying to understand why so many people were still without health insurance, or were in plans that still left them in financial distress. We started out with a dozen families who had chosen not to go uninsured, planning to follow them for the year, but the project rapidly expanded after the online survey tool we developed to ask people to share their stories returned thousands of responses (see answer to question four for detail), creating a huge database of new story leads. We concluded that the problems of insurance affordability reached high up into the middle class, affecting a far wider spectrum of income than we had first assumed. We gained a deep understanding of the frustration of people who could afford insurance, but had done the math and decided it wasn’t a good deal for them. And we concluded that many Americans were just as frustrated with their health-care choices as they were when the Affordable Care Act became law.
