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Post#12 (Class 18) – Cheng Dong
March 29, 2015 | 1 Comment
Class 18: Affordable Care Act – Bless or Curse?
It is hard to simply determine whether President Obama’s Affordable Care Act as positive or negative. The extent of the effects of the Affordable Care Act depends on the group of people in questions. Depending on one’s current health care statues, the act can cause both benefits and harms. One’s health care statues can be generally divided into three different factors, whether one has a health care plan, how much premium one has to pay, and whether one has need to a health care insurance. The differences in these situations among different families make the Affordable Care Act very different things among them.
Before criticizing the Act, however, we must first acknowledge the accomplishments that the act was able to bring. In general, the act was able to accomplish its original purpose set out by President Obama, to increase the number of Americans who have health insurance. Despite the fact that it’s still a long distance away from the ideal goal of universal health care, it is still worth commemorations. According to the New York Times article by Margot Sanger–Katz and Kevin Quealy, we can see evidence that the total uninsured Americans have dropped. The decrease followed a generally recognized pattern of poverty among the population. In terms of race there are the Blacks and Hispanics, in terms of age there is the young group from 18 – 34, and in terms of income the lowest 20% received the most decrease in uninsured rate. This trend followed a general pattern of poverty population and is surely an aid to many poor families burdened by high health care costs. However, such trend won’t always be positive thing as added health care insurance might turn out to be more of a burden than a boost for some.
While the Affordable Care Act has given many Americans the opportunity to escape the fear of not being able to pay for their illness, it has given some the fear of not being able to pay for their living. As those stories from the New York Times tell us, not everyone is happy about the new health insurance policy. Like we said it’s about whether you have an insurance policy, how much you are paying, and whether you need one. To many people the Affordable Care Act is a blessing because it provided them with insurance policies that they can afford. For these people, they are rid of the fear of becoming sick or the fear of dying without help, if they are sick already. On the other hand, there are people who don’t feel that the Affordable Care Act is helpful because they feel health insurance isn’t needed for them. In these cases we mostly have healthy people who is struggling to make a living. To them, the health insurance policies are forced onto them as extra burdens that only make their lives harder by the extra payments of premiums, which is still quite an amount to them after the subsidies. Even for those with a condition they couldn’t pay to cure, after the condition is cured, the added health insurance would be nothing more than an added weight for them. It is this forceful nature of the Affordable Care Act that makes it a controversial issue.
The negative aspects of the Affordable Care Act has always been somewhat of a mystery to me. The negative aspect being the mandatory nature behind the act, being its requirement that people buy health care coverage or face penalty fines. Why is there a requirement to buy health insurance? After all, if the health insurance is made affordable then people in need of it would naturally come to purchase the coverage, and there is no need to persist them. As for the ones who don’t need health care coverage, the insurance would only be a burden for them instead of providing any help. In the end, it really is puzzling to me as to what good does the mandatory requirements to purchase health care coverage do?
While the intentions of the Affordable Care Act has been good, and its effects generally positive, its overly forceful policies has raised many concerns. The biggest controversy of which is the mandatory purchase of health care coverage. This requirement brings an extra burden onto families who are already in financial trouble. While it might not be seen as a burden if the family has members with health issues, it certainly would be for those healthy yet poor families. It is not surprising that the act was disliked by many Americans, perhaps it is just not the way towards universal health care coverage by forcing it onto people.
1 Comment so far
The requirement to buy was to get healthy as well as sick people to buy insurance, as it tends to be self-selecting (people don’t buy until they’re sick and too many sick people bankrupts the insurance company). So universal health care (covering everyone) spreads the risk.