According to a new Commonwealth Fund study published Friday, Obamacare has sharply reduced the number of young Americans lacking health coverage, reversing a decade-long trend that saw a rise in the ranks of the young and uninsured. The study also finds that uninsurance rates for Americans as a whole remained relatively unchanged, leading the authors to emphasize that full implementation of the Affordable Care Act will be critical to securing Americans’ health coverage.

The report, based on a biennial survey of Americans’ access to health insurance, found that adults aged 19 to 25 had seen their uninsurance rates fall “from 48 percent in 2010 to 41 percent in 2012, from 13.6 million [young adults] to 11.7 million — a decline of 1.9 million.” And those are just the numbers for a single year — since the health care law was passed in 2010, a full 3.4 million young Americans have become newly-insured. That represents a 10 percent upward swing in two years:

Researchers say that this positive development is almost entirely a consequence of Obamacare’s provision allowing adults up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ health plans. Still, 46 percent of all adults, or “an estimated 84 million people, did not have insurance for the full year or were underinsured and unprotected from high out-of-pocket costs” in 2012. Addressing these Americans’ high medical costs and lack of access to health insurance demonstrates the need to carefully implement the rest of the health care law, as highlighted by Obamacare’s success in providing young Americans with coverage.

But that could be difficult given conservative critics’ steadfast opposition to all things Obamacare, which is bolstered by the media’s predilection for pouncing on any potential problems with the law — regardless of whether or not such claims are housed in reality. In particular, GOP governors who remain reticent to take part in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion could end up undermining reform by denying health benefits to some of America’s most vulnerable populations — and prevent the same kind of progress being seen with young adults from taking hold with U.S. adults at large.

Jeff Bauman, center, promoting the Boston Marathon

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday, Jeff Bauman’s image was seared into the American consciousness. An extremely graphic photo of Bauman being escorted in a wheelchair with most of his legs blown off quickly went viral. Public admiration for Bauman rose even further after reports surfaced that he had looked into the eyes of one of the bombing suspects minutes before the explosion, and that the moment he awoke from emergency care, he gave law enforcement critical information that substantially narrowed their field of suspects. But while police continue to scour the streets for at-large suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 27-year-old Bauman is scouring the internet for donations to help pay for his outsized medical bills.

Bauman’s friends created the page “Bucks For Bauman!” on the gofundme.com crowdfunding service. The money raised through donations to the site are meant to help Jeff and his family pay the exorbitant costs of his surgeries, ongoing medical care, and physical therapy. Since Tuesday, when the site was launched, Americans from across the country have poured in $158,294 in donations — over half of the overall $300,000 goal.

Bauman has been fortunate enough to receive an impressive number of donations to help him pay his bills, and his uncle plans to buy him his first pair of prosthetic legs. But many other victims in the Boston bombings may not be as fortunate. The cost of treating the bombing survivors’ injuries is expected to exceed $9 million. The out-of-pocket costs associated with that treatment could bury many of the victims financially, even if they do have insurance — unless hospitals, insurers, and charitable foundations swoop in to help, as they did after the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

You can donate to Jeff Bauman’s recovery fund here.

With Obamacare on the pathway towards full implementation, critics have attempted to point out every perceived flaw in the health reform law to marshal public opinion against it. Recently, reform opponents have focused their sights on the rule that prevents insurers from charging seniors more than three times the premiums they charge younger Americans, claiming it will cause young people’s health premiums to skyrocket.

That provision is actually meant to protect seniors, who are costlier to cover, from excessive price gouging. But health reform critics point out that insurance companies may try to exploit the rule to raise prices for younger Americans, making these young people’s health coverage unaffordable. According to a new Urban Institute analysis, however, these allegations are rooted more in wishful thinking than policy reality.

According to the Urban Institute’s findings, the 3:1 premium ratio will have little effect on younger Americans, as “they will be eligible for either Medicaid or tax credits through state health insurance exchanges.” The study goes on to conclude that through a combination of elevated Medicaid/CHIP benefits, Obamacare’s provision allowing adults up to 26 years of age to stay on their parents’ insurance, and the health reform law’s private insurance subsidies for Americans living up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), younger Americans will not experience the sort of “sticker shock” that the doomsayers have been foretelling:

Most young adults and families will be largely shielded from the full effects of the narrower age rating bands thanks to the ACA’s increased eligibility for Medicaid and tax credits offered through state health insurance exchanges or through access to employer-sponsored insurance. In fact, this is largely true across age groups. Eighty-five percent of policies sold through nongroup exchanges will be to those with incomes at or below 400 percent of federal poverty level (FPL), making them eligible for tax credits.

Looking specifically at young adults age 21–27 purchasing nongroup insurance today, two-thirds will be protected by Medicaid/CHIP or exchange-based subsidies under reform; two-thirds of the remainder are under age 26 and in homes where their parents have employer-based coverage for which they are eligible under the ACA’s dependent coverage provisions.

The study’s findings emphasize both the importance of states taking part in Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion and the tendency for Obamacare critics to portray the law as some sort of fiscal bogeyman. Even the media has been complicit in smearing the law, implicitly suggesting that some insurers’ plans to institute double-digit premium hikes are in anticipation of Obamacare’s expansive coverage requirements — they are not. The new Urban Institute analysis is yet further proof that there is a considerable gap between the rhetoric and the reality when it comes to Obamacare.

When the bipartisan Wellstone-Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) was signed into law in 2008, mental health advocates hoped it would begin bridging the gap between the way that mental health treatments and more “traditional” medical services are provided — particularly by prohibiting different standards for one type of care over the other. Unfortunately, the evidence shows there’s still a long way to go when it comes to making the dream of medical parity a reality.

Time’s new Mayo clinic-sponsored report points out that ADHD, while being increasingly diagnosed and treated in children, has lingering long-term effects on adults and is a strong indicator of co-occurring mental illnesses for both children and adults. But lax insurance requirements, as well as a lack of awareness about the long-term effects of mental illness, have led to a dearth of research regarding the comprehensive effects of what medical professionals tend to dismiss as a childhood behavioral disorder:

It’s not that the condition isn’t being addressed adequately, or that doctors, parents and teachers are not aware of the condition: they certainly are, since education and awareness about ADHD has increased in recent decades, even contributing to a rise in diagnoses… [Dr. Barbaresi of Boston Children’s Hospital and Mayo Clinic] argues, however, that the legacy and long term implications of an ADHD diagnosis haven’t really been considered and studied adequately, since most doctors tend to think of the condition as one that primarily affects children that they tend to outgrow once they reach adulthood. The need for attention is even greater considering that the study also found a connection between ADHD and suicide. While the absolute number of deaths in the adults who still have ADHD is low, the statistical difference is significant: children with ADHD were nearly five times more likely to die from suicide than other people in the study group. [...]

In addition, data from this same group of study participants showed that more than 60% of kids with ADHD have a learning disability and develop at least one additional mental-health problem while they’re still children. Yet insurance companies are reluctant to authorize additional assessments that may detect and treat these conditions. “If a child gets diagnosed with ADHD, we want to do a comprehensive psychological assessment to see if the child has undiagnosed disorders because we know these kids are at risk,” says Barbaresi. “But insurance won’t pay.”

That’s in stark contrast to the way that children are evaluated for other medical conditions, such as diabetes. “We know they’re at risk for developing kidney and eye problems so they’re regularly assessed for those issues. We don’t wait until a child has renal failure or loses his eyesight,” says Barbaresi. “But with childhood ADHD, we can’t get authorization to do these assessments until it’s already happened.”

The Mayo study on ADHD underscores the practical hurdles of enacting true parity between the ways that mental health disorders and more “traditional” medical problems are diagnosed, treated, and even researched. Societal stigmas and decades of traditional medical practice have perpetuated a system in which mental health disorders are considered to be unique, individualistic medical problems — they are not — that ignores the interplay that mental disorders have with other medical conditions, not to mention the physical manifestations of such disorders.

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From the minute that President Obama signed his landmark health reform bill into law, conservative critics have been issuing dire warnings about how expensive Obamacare will make employer-sponsored health coverage, asserting it would be cheaper for larger companies to drop coverage for their workers — and pay a fine if their employees obtain federally subsidized coverage through Obamacare’s insurance exchanges — rather than provide basic health benefits. As it turns out, those predictions aren’t actually becoming reality.

According to Modern Healthcare, a new “survey of nearly 800 large and midsize employers found that just 6 percent of respondents intend to completely exit the healthcare system over the next three to five years” over concerns about the penalty that Obamacare will level against large companies that don’t provide adequate benefits for their workers.

That assessment stands in stark contrast to some Obamacare opponents’ more outlandish claims. Major conservative institutions and healthy policy experts — including the Heritage Foundation and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who is a former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director — have predicted that anywhere between 20 million and 35 million Americans will lose employer-sponsored insurance because of Obamacare. Even respected consulting firm McKinsey and Co. predicted that “30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering [employer-sponsored insurance] in the years after 2014,” the year that most Obamacare provisions — including the employer mandate — kick in.

In fact, that kind of mass exodus would be fraught with risks for companies, considering that approximately 70 percent of Americans receive health coverage through their employer. The prospect of losing workers over decreased benefits is a powerful disincentive for the companies that might have considered ditching health coverage to cut costs. As Jim Winkler of Aon Hewitt’s U.S. health and benefits department put it, employers’ incentive to stop sponsoring health insurance “is strong until you look at the numbers. Between the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] penalties for failing to offer coverage and the ensuing talent flight risk, most employers believe they need to continue to play a role in employee health.”

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Missourinet reports that state Sen. David Pearce (R-Warrensburg) has introduced a bill into committee that would “mandate health insurance coverage for Missourians with eating disorders that would cover the diagnosis and treatment of the eating disorder as well as residential, medical, and psychiatric treatment.”

While Pearce’s proposal is capped at $30,000 per beneficiary — to be paid for out of the state’s general fund — it still represents one of the most comprehensive approaches to addressing a public health concern that often goes ignored:

Pearce says funding for the coverage would stem from the state’s heath plan. “The funding, I would assume would come from general revenue. A lot of this would be done by the Missouri consolidated health plan,” he said. “So a lot of that could be taken from existing information, statistics, that the state already has.”

Pearce says that by having this coverage, it can ward off the possibility of long-term hospital stays, or even death, by posing the questions, how much money can be saved in the long run and how many lives can be saved? “Eating disorders is treatable if it’s caught early,” he said. “And how we can save lives and improve the lives of folks, and yet, if we don’t catch it early eating disorders has the number one fatality of all mental illnesses.”

Pearce rightfully calls eating disorders what they are — mental illnesses — but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Eating disorders are extraordinarily complex conditions to treat, as effective regimens address the intertwining physical and mental components of the disease. That’s easier said than done in a health care system that does not assume parity between mental services and more “traditional” treatments. And while Obamacare will require insurance plans to offer some form of mental health coverage as one of its “essential health benefits,” states still have most of the discretion when it comes to determining how generous those benefits will be.

That’s also what makes Pearce’s bill important. Lack of adequate funding for comprehensive eating disorder coverage prevents nine out of ten Americans suffering from the condition from receiving treatment — $30,000 in comprehensive benefits could significantly shift that dynamic in Missouri.