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Affordable Care Act Analysis

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‘Over 105 million people living in America today no longer have to worry about having their health benefits cut off’ (Secretary WH) . Since enacted, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been able to provide for millions of lower and middle class Americans a secure and reasonable healthcare plan that best suits their medical needs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) also commonly refer to as ‘Obamacare’ was a solution implemented in 2010 to help reform the precarious healthcare system in the United States. The ACA imposed three key reforms adopted from the successful Massachusetts system of healthcare. First, the ACA established a “guaranteed issue and community rating requirements” which essential barred healthcare insurances …show more content…

Burwell on which they were asked to evaluate whether the executive branch’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act was consistent with the language of the law as enumerated by congress. In other words, the Supreme Court had to tackle the issue about whether the ACA tax credits are available in states that have a federal exchange instead of a state exchange. States, according to the law are given full autonomy to form an “exchange” provision of their own that would allow people seeking healthcare coverage to shop for individual health plans. However, if states fail to implement an exchange then the federal government’s Health and Human Services (HHS) would directly intervene to establish one for the …show more content…

Burwell. As chief justice Roberts elucidated in his majority opinion that “such Exchange, under section 18041 instructs the Secretary to establish and operate the same exchange that state was directed to establish under section 18031…. because they do not differ in any meaningful way”. So therefore, state exchanges and federal exchanges must uniformly meet the same requirements, perform the same functions, and serve the same purposes. It is indeed fair to say that the wording of the phrase does explicitly mention that exchanges established by ‘states’ only would receive refundable tax credit, however such interpretation would definitely destabilize the individual insurance market in any state with a federal exchange, and also likely to create the very ‘death spiral’ that congress designed the act to avoid. In which the cost of medical premiums will rise significantly, the number of people buying healthcare insurance to decline, and insurers leaving the market entirely. Chief Justice Roberts also explained how the structure of section 36B itself suggests that tax credit are not limited to state exchanges. Section 36B(a) initially provides that tax credits “shall be allowed” for any “applicable taxpayer.” Furthermore, section 36B(c)(1) then defines an “applicable taxpayer” as ‘someone who (among other things) has a household income between 100 percent and 400 percent of the

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