Affordable Care Act Pros And Cons

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), called the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or better known as Obamacare, was passed on March 23, 2010 by President Barack Obama. The ACA has survived an election, a Supreme Court challenge, a government shutdown, a website meltdown, and has far exceeded its first year’s enrollment expectations (Altman 228). It has a lot of benefits that most people oversee because they have been hit with more negative than positive messages about the ACA. At the core of the ACA are insurance industry improvements and expanded coverage, with a goal of improved clinical outcomes and reduced costs of care (Rudnicki et al. 351). The ACA is good for the people of the United States because it ensures affordable coverage

The only way one could get around this clause was if one worked for a big company which incentivized people to work for big companies. Now, the ACA created healthcare exchanges where private companies could compete for people’s business, but they cannot discriminate on gender or preexisting conditions. Theses exchanges are designed to give consumers and small business comparable choices in health insurance coverage (go.galegroup.com). The law also expands Medicaid, which would get insurance to more poor people, and requires companies with more than fifty employees to provide affordable insurance to their employees or pay a big penalty. This would all be paid for by cost control measures like getting tougher on Medicare fraud, incentivizing hospitals to keep elderly patients healthy so they do not get readmitted to the hospital. There’s also a new tax on tanning salons and an increase in the Medicare payroll tax for income over 250 thousand dollars a

While the growth of our healthcare costs has slowed, citizens still spend over 17 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on healthcare. Most other developed countries spend far less than that and still have citizens that live longer and healthier lives than Americans. The thing about the ACA is it is not completely thorough. For the vast majority of people, very little has changed, and that means that the underlined problems have not really changed. The United States still spends a lot on healthcare and gets too little in return. However, the old system was definitely not working, and the ACA is doing well since its job is to get health insurance to people who do not have it without disturbing the health insurance ecosystem. The ACA did not really replace an existing system, but grew on top of