“Last summer, just before the first open enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) conducted a baseline survey of California’s uninsured nonelderly adult population. After the open enrollment period came to a close, we conducted a second survey with the same group of individuals who participated in the baseline (a longitudinal-panel survey) to find out whether they obtained coverage or remained uninsured and to explore the coverage choices people made, their experiences with open enrollment and their new insurance. Additional waves of the panel survey over the next two years will continue to track this same group of individuals to capture their changing attitudes and experiences. The surveys are designed and analyzed by researchers at KFF and the fieldwork costs associated with Wave 2 of the survey were paid for by The California Endowment. California was an early adopter of the ACA and has been a leader in enrolling eligible residents in coverage through the two main avenues for expanding coverage under the law – Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program, and Covered California, the new state marketplace where people can shop for insurance and access government subsidies to help pay for coverage. This longitudinal panel study allows us to follow a large group of randomly selected uninsured Californians and assess how their insurance status changes over time to learn more about why or why not those changes occurred, and what gaining health insurance means for their daily lives without having to rely on respondents ability to report and recall details from months or years ago. By tracking a scientifically representative panel, we can quantify how widespread or limited certain problems or changes that may have been reported anecdotally actually were.  Statistically representative narratives and stories from individual’s actual experiences can then be drawn from the sample to illuminate more accurately how the uninsured fare as the law is implemented in California.”

• See also via CRS – Implementing the Affordable Care Act: Delays, Extensions, and Other Actions Taken by the Administration, July 28, 2014