ATLANTA, March 24 (UPI) -- The number of uninsured Americans fell by 11 million in the four years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
A report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday found that in the first nine months of 2014, 37.2 million people were uninsured, or about 11.9 percent of the entire population.
That's down from 48.6 million people uninsured in 2010, the year Obamacare was first signed into law.
The most dramatic decrease in that number came between 2013 and 2014. The health insurance marketplace stage of the ACA went into effect Oct. 1, 2013, giving Americans the ability to sign up for private health insurance independently of their employers.
The number of uninsured between those two years fell by 7.6 million.
The 37.2 million still uninsured in the first part of 2014 was the lowest the country has seen in more than 15 years. The United States got close to that number in 1999 with 38.7 million uninsured. It peaked since then in 2010.
The report also found that about 27.2 million people responded that they had been without health insurance for more than a year in 2014, and 53.5 million were uninsured for at least part of the year prior to the survey.