Pros And Cons Of Obamacare: The Affordable Care Act

22 million. 22 million is the number of Americans who would not have had health insurance if it were not for Obamacare. That is around 4 times the number of people living in Singapore. Whether it be a cancer patient, or an employee working 30 hours a week, they may not have been insured. Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act (ACA), is a health care act implemented in the US law, which was passed in 2010. It works to make health insurance more affordable for Americans, and essentially, improve the healthcare system in the US. But, many people oppose this healthcare act because they believe that the government should not force people to get insured, and pay a penalty for not doing so. However, one has to realise that although they may not have

Many of the opponents of Obamacare completely overlook how beneficial it is for women. Pre-existing conditions like C-sections, insurance plans with maternity services and the equality of insurance costs for men and women are all included in Obamacare. However, before Obamacare was executed, women’s costs for health insurance could be 1.5 times that of men, according to Wharton. Obamacare prohibited this immoral discrimination in 2014. If Obamacare were to be revoked, women would suffer much higher rates of insurance due to this unethical presumption that they are more “expensive”. In fact, “if you remove maternity services, women are not more expensive to insure than men are—they simply use healthcare differently,” as pointed out by Wharton. Although women have higher costs such as childbirth, these bills eventually become fairly equivalent. This is because men become more expensive as they get older since they are more susceptible to having heart attacks, lung and liver cancer. Nonetheless, women still had to bear higher costs, as if being born as a girl came with an exorbitant price tag. 28% of women had problems with paying medical charges, whereas only 19% of men had these issues before Obamacare was implemented, as stated by The Atlantic. It was actually legal to charge women more for the same health insurance, and would have still been if it were not for

As mentioned in the Business Insider, anything from high blood pressure to cancer and even to acne, is considered a pre-existing condition. Others include diabetes, asthma and pregnancy. Opponents believe that “the vast majority of Americans with health insurance were already in plans that were required to offer them coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions”, as stated in Forbes. One cannot deny that before Obamacare, perhaps a small percentage of Americans were unable to get coverage due to pre-existing conditions. But, there are ways to see that this could have aggravated if it were not for Obamacare. According to CNBC, more than half a million people with pre-existing conditions were denied coverage by the four most prominent health insurance companies from 2007 to 2009. As stated by the ASPE U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, about 1 in 2 Americans have pre-existing conditions, and many of them could have been denied health insurance if it were not for Obamacare. Thus, from a long-term aspect, Obamacare will make a huge impact not only by protecting, but also by drastically reducing the costs of health insurance for tens of millions of Americans with pre-existing