What is Obama care? How does it work?

What is Obamacare?

It is known as The Affordable Care Act (ACA) which was sign into law in March 2010 by President Barack Obama. The act aimed to provide affordable health insurance coverage to millions of American citizens. This mostly be beneficial to those who are unemployed or have low-paying jobs. The ACA was also designed to protect people from insurance company tactics that might build up patient costs or restrict care. There are some key features of Obamacare are provided below:

1.    Expand Access to Insurance: The law expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income individuals and allows young adults to remain on parents’ policies until age 26.

2.    Increase Consumer Insurance Protections:  Prohibits lifetime monetary caps on insurance coverage, limits the use of annual caps, and establishes state rate reviews for insurance premium increases. 

3.    Prevention and Wellness: Provides grants to states for prevention activities, such as disease screenings and immunizations.

4.    Improve Health Quality and Curb Costs: It gave guidelines to reduce medical errors and create payment mechanisms to improve efficiency and results and improve care coordination among providers.

How does Obamacare work?

The ACA helps people get health insurance who may not get coverage because of lack of workplace health insurance, their finances, or preexisting conditions. Moreover, people who have household incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level can receive premium tax credits to lower health care costs and make critical procedures and medications available.

Obamacare Act can be very useful in a way that you can review health plans in your area, compare costs and coverages in one place rather than track down the information, and Prevents insurers from making unreasonable rate increases. On the other hand, some people argue that ACA plans are generally more expensive than other types of coverage and high-income people will have to pay more in Medicare payroll taxes and a new tax on dividends and capital gains, and other income they don’t earn.

In the end, Obamacare helps in stimulating an economy by putting more money into families’ pocket, boosting demand, which lead to lower unemployment rate and improving health and making workers more productive. For example, greater access to care brings down mortality rate and improve self-reported health status.

This article is a part of the class “751309 Macroeconomics 2”, supervised by Asst. Prof. Napon Hongsakulvasu, Faculty of Economics, Chiang Mai University.

This article was written by Kawisara Kongla, 651615002

References:

https://time.com/45867/barack-obama-obamacare-affordable-care-act/

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/what-is-obamacare/

https://www.healthline.com/health/consumer-healthcare-guide/pros-and-cons-obamacare

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/affordable-care-act.asp

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/02/06/six-economic-benefits-affordable-care-act