Affordable Care Act and Marijuana

 When the Affordable Care Act was upheld by the Supreme Court, several people commended the Court for refusing to remove the only social protection they had which was established and improved by the New Deal as well as the Great Society. The House of Congress agreed to allow certain states have a significant level of command on the way federal programs such as Medicaid were implemented on the condition that it would be free to set up and enlarge its planned national entitlement schemes (Brown-Nagin, 2013). A huge disagreement in the beliefs of federalism has been bared for all via the suits contesting the Obamacare mandate. A school of thought believes that the government should get involved even constitutionally in situations when certain states do not have individual capabilities to settle a particular dispute. This school also believes that the main reason why the Constitution clearly specifies national bodies is in order to give Congress the power to arbitrate joint problems faced by the states. I will call this school of thought collective action federalism, based on write-ups by Neil Siegel and Robert Cooter (Moncrieff, 2012). Health insurance packages specific to individual states make up the second biggest tenet of the ACA’s coverage enlargement. People living on incomes which are 138 to 400 percent poverty inclined are free by the law to buy special national reduced insurance via these packages. These ACA establishments were based on a mechanism known as “partial preemption.” States would be given special funds by the federal government to design and implement its own insurance package. In cases where the state turns down this offer, the federal government will organize an organization which would carry this out. 

Any insurance company which would operate in this package would need to give out basic health coverage and show capability of providing other forms of coverage in order to be seen as qualified. The ACA established a punishment via tax on anyone who didn’t procure their insurance covers via the packages. For the ACA to be formed, Congress left a lot of the brainwork to the executive. Over forty benefits of the ACA are subject to the reading of the laws and the giving out of official guidelines in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act by the administration. Nonetheless, its other benefits enjoin federal officers to create programs and processes even though it doesn’t specify doing this using by official methods. By applying this method and several others, the national and state officials had the power to carve the ACA as they wish. In the latter part of year 2013, over seventy conclusive laws and effects of established guidelines has been released by the Obama government (Thompson & Gusmano, 2014).

Marijuana is arguably the most popular of illicit drugs due to its widespread consumption, interest by governments and its non-adverse effect. Over 65 million American have taken marijuana at least once and its consumption has no connected with higher death rates. During the ‘70s, Canada and the United States made moves towards changing the laws guiding marijuana. The continuous and rising consumption of the substance in spite of the law was causing a strain on law enforcement and the courts, the public were warming up to the drug and everyone was working, consciously and unconsciously, towards the allowance of having little personal quantities by the law (Moncrieff, 2012). An analysis of the states which reformed their laws on marijuana from 2010 to 2014 in comparison to those who didn’t showed that crime rate wasn’t affected by this action. Even though a number of studies shows that there is a higher rate of crime in states which haven’t reformed their laws, this disparity is really negligible. If states which have allowed marijuana consumption as well as those which has allowed the use of its medical form are compared to other states which have not, it is clear that there is a lower quantity of crime in the first set of states even though this is not very visible. Studies equally showed that the level of allowance of marijuana (totally disallowed, legalized or allowed medically, legalized and allowed medically) by the state had no effect on the 2014 crime rate. In fact, when the data was filtered to only causative factors for criminal acts, the legalization of marijuana still didn’t give any significant inference on the rate of violent crime in 2014 (Single, 1989).

In the 24 states and regions which allow medical marijuana use, mental problems were the major ailment it was used for in 10 (41.7%) of the states, especially to reduce the effect of Alzheimer’s condition. For the states, five in number, where there was available data on the conditions for medical marijuana use, mental problems forms <0.5% of the medical marijuana licenses (Maust et al, 2016). There was a higher rate of increase in the number of hospitalizations of children due to marijuana exposures in Colorado compared to the United States. The 2 years before and after legal allowance of marijuana when studied showed that there was a rise in the number of children treatments and RPC cases due to marijuana exposures. In fact, about 50% of the children currently in the hospital 2 years after marijuana was allowed had suffered exposure to marijuana, an indication that legalizing the substance was the direct cause of higher child exposures (Wang et al, 2016).