Essay Example on Obama's ACA: 10-Category Health Insurance Policy for All

Barack Obama’s Administration, together with the 111th Congress in 2010, proposed, enacted, and implemented the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) that is popularly known as Obamacare. The ACA thus became a federal statute responsible for the fundamental health benefits. The ACA stipulates the ten basic categories under the health insurance policies, including the services offered by doctors, outlining the inpatient and outpatient care environment, the child-delivery and pregnancy, and the coverage for the prescriptions of drugs, among other medical-related areas. The ACA has undergone numerous development since its initiation and the 2016 presidential election. The research focuses on analyzing the critical areas of the ACA.

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There have been numerous changes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) since 2016, after Trump’s administration took over from Obama. Some of the most notable changes include the elimination of the aspect of the individual mandate from the ACA (Corrigan, Krase, & Reed, 2017). Additionally, the new administration made changes such as adding the provision for "work requirements" as stipulated in the Medicaid, eliminating the aspect of cost-sharing and reduction subsidies that the insurers enjoyed previously, expanding the spectrum of accessibility to the short-term "skinny" policies and revising and scaling down the funds essential to the signups and registrations to the HealthCare.gov platform.

The changes in the ACA has many impacts on the patients’ access to healthcare in terms of the costs and the quality that the healthcare services provided. First, the elimination of individual mandate implied that the penalties that people would pay for lack of a health insurance premium or policy changed to zero (Rudnicki et al. 2016). It is worth noting that the primary intent of the mandate was to increase the financial base for Medicare by having a more significant number of people registered under the health insurance plans. Therefore, the insurance premium costs increased significantly, increasing the healthcare costs as the number of people subscribing to medical insurance reduced. Secondly, the application of the work requirement changes on the ACA meant that the beneficiaries of the insurance plans would provide documented evidence for their work or educational engagement. The change in the ACA had the impact of increasing the quality of healthcare services as it ensured the HealthCare.gov and other health insurance organizations had a cohesive and reliable database (Rudnicki et al. 2016). Therefore, those who were not eligible from the previous plans were eliminated from the program. The development was also advantageous as it placed the beneficiaries in control of their health services requirements and incentives, thereby increasing the overall healthy lifestyles.

Thirdly, the 2017 changes on the ACA involving subsidizing the insurers meant that the federal government had removed the motivational factors keeping these companies under the ACA. As a result, most of the insurers increased the premium costs primarily for the “silver plans” offered. Lack of subsidies had the effects of increasing healthcare costs for the low-income earners since these organizations could not provide premiums at low costs (French et al. 2016). A critical analysis of the situation indicates that access to healthcare, which largely depends on income, left out a significant portion of the poor and low-income earning individuals. The fourth impact of the changes made on the ACA is evident through the extension of the “skinny plans” (Ginossar et al. 2019). The expansion meant that a significant number of people would abandon the ACA plan and embrace the cheap services offered through the new plans. Concerning the access to quality healthcare, the people opting for the cheap services introduced through the “skinny” had medical coverage limited to certain specific conditions. Therefore, they would either sick additional cover from other insurance plans to get full protection or remain with these “skinny” plans. In other words, the changes had the impact of limiting people’s access to quality healthcare and increasing the costs of full insurance plans. Finally, the changes in the ACA had different impacts on the costs, quality, and access to healthcare. In some instances, the changes had the effect of increasing the costs of medical care, which led to significantly decreased in quality of healthcare as well as access to these services.

Conclusion

The status of the people newly enrolled under the ACA takes different distinct paths. Some were enrolled under their employers, while others under the exchanges from the developed online platforms. Thus, the people falling under the new enrolment were relatively young and also fit health-wise (Bustamante et al. 2019).

The Medicaid program and the ACA have close relations as the latter made several developments on the Medicaid. The ACA has numerous impacts on Medicaid, including increasing the service base or the number of people with health insurance plans in the United States. The ACA effected the Medicaid by introducing the revised tax credits on the premiums in the private health insurance world (Liu et al. 2020). Therefore, it directly made the key reforms and developments in the health insurance markets, which directly impact the Medicaid program. The Medicaid and the ACA programs, thus, interact in these aspects.

References

Bustamante, A. V., Chen, J., McKenna, R. M., & Ortega, A. N. (2019). Health care access and utilization among US immigrants before and after the Affordable Care Act. Journal of immigrant and minority health, 21(2), 211-218.

Corrigan, M. J., Krase, K., & Reed, J. C. (2017). A social work response to the affordable care act: prevention and early intervention. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 49(2), 169-173.

French, M. T., Homer, J., Gumus, G., & Hickling, L. (2016). Key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA): a systematic review and presentation of early research findings. Health services research, 51(5), 1735-1771.

Ginossar, T., Van Meter, L., Shah, S. F. A., Bentley, J. M., Weiss, D., & Oetzel, J. G. (2019). Early impact of patient protection and affordable care act on people living with HIV: A systematic review. Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, 30(3), 259-269.

Liu, Y., Colditz, G. A., Kozower, B. D., James, A., Greever-Rice, T., Schmaltz, C., & Lian, M. (2020). Association of Medicaid Expansion Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act With Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer Survival. JAMA oncology.

Rudnicki, M., Armstrong, J. H., Clark, C., Marcus, S. G., Sacks, L., Moser, A. J., & Reid-Lombardo, K. (2016). Expected and Unexpected Consequences of the Affordable Care Act: The Impact on Patients and Surgeons–Pro and Con Arguments. Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery, 20(2), 351-360.