On March 23,2010 the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, was signed into law. This act aims to provide affordable health care coverage for all United States citizens. “The Affordable Care Act affirms the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.” (President Obama) It will provide insurance to more than thirty million people who have been previously uninsured, and will be achieved by expanding Medicaid and extending federal subsidies to the lower and middle income Americans to aid in purchasing private coverage. Although many attempt to view it in a completely positive or completely negative way it affects all aspects of the health care industry in various ways.
The effect of the Affordable Care Act has created a positive influx on the major insurance carriers. According to the New York Times it has made insurers the “most direct beneficiaries of the law.” (investor pedia) Since 2013 these insurance companies have been some of the more profitable stars of Wall Street (Forbes.com). Aetna Inc., Anthem INC., Cigna, Humana Inc., and United Health Inc., the five biggest health insurers in America, have outperformed the S&P 500 Index over the last five years (invesotrpedia). One of the major reasons this is proved to be true is exchange premiums for the young and the healthy are much higher with Obamacare than ever before. As stated above The Affordable Care Act mandates that each individual must be insured
With the implementation of any new program there are bound to be unforeseen errors that causes the plan to be seen as failing when in reality it is just working through some issues. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is going through that process right now. A simple example to point to is the website that was built for the new healthcare system crashing when it was launched. The ACA is also exposing flaws in how healthcare is funded and also projected. With an estimated 32 million people gaining access to healthcare sharing of patient information is going to be vital, new technology will have to emerge to help with the surge of patient information. Along with the expansion of access to healthcare it is exposing the lack of qualified
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a health reform law that was signed by President Barrack Obama on March 23, 2010. The full name of the law is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). One week later the President also signed a law called the Health Care Education and Reconciliation Act (HCERA), which was a supplement that made several changes the PPACA. What the country currently refers to as the ACA or "Obamacare" is both of these laws combined. (McDonough, 2012)
The Affordable Care Act, in its time, has helped many uninsured Americans to obtain health insurance by giving them guaranteed coverage. About 20 million Americans, based on the statistics from the New York Times’s article titled “Fact Check: Trump’s Critiques of the Affordable Care Act.”, have obtained health insurance through the ACA. Dropping the uninsured rate to 11 percent by 2013 (Qiu 2017). Americans, through the ACA, were able to get health insurance even if they got sick, which inevitably happens to many. This put insurers in a place where they cannot deny coverage to people who have preexisting conditions, or their health history. Other main points that are included in Former President Obama’s Affordable Care Act is that one, it was given as an individual mandate that all U.S. Citizens and legal residents must enroll for qualifying health care or get penalized for not signing up for insurance at all. Making the fact that getting health care is mandatory is a good way to lower the insured rates and save many Americans money when the next unexpected hospital visits or illnesses come up. Another thing is that the ACA has also expanded medicaid to all non-Medicaid eligible individuals that are under the age 65 and making medicaid more federal funded based rather than a state issue. Thus helping those who could not afford
Data shows that there are more Americans covered now that there were before. However, having insurance coverage is not the same as having access to healthcare. Since the implementation of the ACA, healthcare has become more expensive and most individuals would not consider their healthcare to be affordable. The cost of running and implementing the program was passed on to healthcare providers through payment cuts. Another unintended consequence was that many employers, under the financial burden of the ACA, reduced the hours of employees that may have previously been given employer-sponsored benefits and therefore forced them into the insurance exchange. Also, insurance companies are dropping out of the insurance exchange every year. The risk pool in the exchange is not what it was expected to be by the government. The penalties for not buying insurance have not been stiff enough to incent young healthy patients to purchase a plan and as such the insured pool is mostly those that really need the coverage and are filing
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, was officially signed into legislation in March 2010. The ACA was a major step in achieving a system of universal healthcare, which essentially means all citizens are provided with healthcare and financial protection. In the 1960’s America introduced the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which helped guarantee some type of medical insurance cover for the very poor (Medicaid) and elderly (Medicare). Even though programs like these assisted in covering the most vulnerable groups of people, many Americans still did not have healthcare insurance. The goal of the ACA reform is to ensure that all Americans are covered by some form of health insurance. The ACA promises healthcare access to
Affordable Care Act (ACA), often known as Obamacare, was signed by President Obama in 2010. The goal of the Act is to increase the number of individuals with health insurance to the point where all Americans are insured by providing quality healthcare at an affordable price. Despite its good intent, the ACA is not as perfect as it may appear. In this paper, I will list the main features of the Act, its pros and cons, and how it affects you as an individual and discuss the King vs. Burwell lawsuit.
The Affordable Care Act or ACA is a federal statute initiated by President Barack Obama, its intended effects were to supply medical coverage at a low cost to millions of Americans who could not afford access to healthcare. There are a variety of economic and scholarly opinions regarding the ACA’s effect on the healthcare market. Many of these viewpoints have changed over the course of Obama’s presidency as the statute began to affect individuals and the healthcare market.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the most significant health care legislation reform in the United States since the passing of Medicare and Medicaid (Russell Sage Foundation, n.d.). Changes in healthcare delivery affect consumers, insurance companies, healthcare providers, and policy makers. Several factors provoked this monumental change in health care. Social, political, and economic forces drive change in the United States healthcare system. Within these categories, scarcity, a changing demography, and interests groups have a profound influence on how we view health care and which policies are enacted.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted in March, 2010. The purpose of this law is to reform public and private health insurance systems resulting in expanded coverage for millions of Americans by the year 2023. Full implementation of the Act, will result in a reduction of the number of uninsured U.S. citizens by more than one-half (Rosenbaum, 2011). The ACA “expands Medicaid eligibility to include all individuals and families with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level” (Riggin, 2013).
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, was a major overhaul to the healthcare system, affecting both employers and employees. The ACA, along with rising healthcare costs, means employers have had to make changes in their healthcare plans and as a result, employees are seeing the affects, good or bad. As Fitzgerald (2014) points out, as the ACA gets closer to full implementation, more organizations will begin backing away from providing health care coverage. Part of the problem that organizations are facing in the future is the so-called Cadillac tax. As explained by healthaffairs.org (2013), the Cadillac tax is an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans and will mostly be paid for by the organizations. The tax, beginning in 2018, is a 40% excise tax on the cost of coverage for health plans that exceed a certain annual limit (healthaffairs.org, 2013). Because of this high tax, many companies are scaling back on coverage and finding ways to shift the cost to employees (Angle, 2014). The analysis presented will describe what ACA is, the problem GMFC faces, possible options, and finally, a solution for GMFC in this case.
Although the act falls short of achieving truly universal coverage, 9 million uninsured people have received coverage so far. Market reforms have not hurt the insurance industry’s profitability, prices for individual insurance have been lower than expected, and government costs so far have been less than initially projected. (Mark A Hall, Richard Lord, 2016)
The Obama health care legislation known as the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) has received mixed reviews over the last couple years. On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, putting in place comprehensive reforms that improve access to affordable health coverage for everyone and protect consumers from abusive insurance company practices (Health Reform in Action, 2012). Many people dislike the idea of Obamacare because of misinformation obtained from the press, political candidates and by those who refuse to seek the information themselves and go on hearsay. The new health reform law provides security to the hardworking citizens of the United States. Obamacare holds insurance companies accountable, lowers health care costs, gives Americans more freedom and control in their health care choices and improves the quality of care (Health Reform in Action, 2012). With Obamacare, insurance agencies
The United States healthcare has got some serious long- term related issues. To begin with, there are millions of people that don’t have insurance and those people that do have it tend pay more for it than they would in other comparable countries. The ACA aims to fix these issues by making affordable insurance available to more Americans.
The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as “Obamacare”, has drastically altered healthcare in America. The goal of this act was to give Americans access to affordable, high quality insurance while simultaneously decreasing overall healthcare spending. The ACA had intended to maximize health care coverage throughout the United States, but this lofty ambition resulted in staggeringly huge financial and human costs.
The advent of the Affordable Care Act was an ambitious achievement. However, it results in insurance companies remaining in a significantly dominant role, counts on economic forces to control rising healthcare costs, and maintains large employers in charge of most people’s health care.