Is the ACA reducing underinsurance?

About 16 percent of the U.S. population has no health insurance. Reducing that percentage by more than half is a primary purpose of the Affordable Care Act. As subsidized coverage in a reformed individual market has become available for the first time in 2014, news coverage has understandably focused mainly on how many previously uninsured people are gaining coverage.

But the ACA also rewrote the rules governing what kinds of coverage health insurance policies had to offer. The revamp was designed to address a problem nearly as pressing as reducing the ranks of the uninsured: tens of millions of Americans were also underinsured, or unreliably insured.  Coverage was subject to annual or lifetime caps and to arbitrary rescission.  Essential benefits such as hospitalization, mental healthcare, rehabilitative care and childbirth were excluded from many policies.

Many ACA provisions designed to end underinsurance have been in effect for some time  -- the ban on lifetime coverage limits has been in place since September 23, 2010, as has mandatory free coverage for a long list of preventive services, including birth control  I would like to examine the extent to which serious uninderinsurance has already been reduced.  What follows is a kind of scope-of-question outline -- a few questions, a few premises, a few observations.