Obama Health Care

Obama Health Care In the original House bill in 2009, the Affordable Care Act would have required individuals to buy private insurance, but would also have offered a public option in the health insurance exchanges and mandated employers to provide health insurance. Premiums for the public opinion would have varied by region (Chaikind et al. 2009). Both the public option and the employer mandates were removed from the Senate version of the bill and do not exist in Public Law 11-148 that President Obama signed in March 2010.

This was a very grave disappointment to liberal and progressive reformers, who had always hoped for a Medicare-for-all plan of national health insurance, but ended up only with mandates to by private health insurance on the exchanges. In both the House and Senate versions of the bill, Medicaid coverage was extended to 150% of the poverty line and Medicare eligibility lowered to age 55, with subsidies to buy private insurance for those with low incomes who were not on Medicaid (Chaikind et al. 2010).

Conservatives, of course, imposed the entire reform and virtually none of the Republicans in Congress voted for it, while those at the state level challenged the individual mandate in the federal courts. Recently, the Supreme Court heard arguments on this issue and may very well overturn the Affordable Care Act either partially or completely. Although the Affordable Health care reform sounds like it would do better good than harm for Americans the insurance companies are having a hard time with making sure they will not be lose money.

Having preventative care covered under each health plan this will hopefully help people remain up-to-date on their preventative care and prevent further illness by catching it earlier than if they would have waited because the preventative care was not covered by their insurance plan. Physicians have often opposed health care reform due to the increase work load with more patients to see and not enough doctors and practitioners to see all of them.

Along with the work overload, the doctors and practitioners as mentioned above are not getting reimbursed right away for services given which can be very frustrating because that is their income. So even though they are seeing more patients, the reimbursement part is not effective. Many medical students are not going into primary care as mentioned above as well. This will be a problem as there will be more patients in the upcoming years as healthcare reform evolves.

We must give the medical students some kind of incentive to do primary care so that there will be enough doctors to provide care to all the patients (Abrams et al. 2011). Under the ACA, there will be increases in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement payments to primary care providers, improvement in the workforce and technical innovations. Over 27 million women were uninsured in 2010, while over 40 million reported difficulty paying health care bills or delaying treatment because of cost issues (Robertson and Collins 2011).

They have difficulty finding affordable insurance with maternity coverage and face higher costs than men. Some aspects of the Affordable Care Act are helpful to women, such as requirements for mammograms and pap smears in existing insurance plans and tax credits for small-business owners. By 2014, all health insurance policies will also be required to include full maternity coverage and a ban on gender discrimination, and Obama Care will reduce the uninsured rates among women by half within five years (Robertson and Collins 2011).

Other reforms in this law include mandated breaks for breast feeding in companies with fifty or more employees, elimination of referrals from primary care physician for gynecological services, smoking cessation coverage and 100% Medicare reimbursement for midwives (Robertson and Collins 2011). Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Affordable Care Act is the individual mandate that requires everyone in the United States purchase health insurance coverage.

Proponents of a mandate argue that requiring 'free riders' to join the health insurance system will combat "adverse selection" in non-group insurance markets -- which occurs when a disproportionate number of sicker-than-average individuals enroll in a health plan and incur costs above what the insurer expected. Without a mechanism to prevent adverse selection, these proponents note, insurance market reform is close to impossible. Opponents of the mandate, meanwhile, argue that it infringes on individual freedoms, and that it might force some people to buy purchase insurance they cannot afford.

Under Obama Care, most households will have room in their budgets for health insurance premiums and that only 10% of families above the federal poverty line ($10,890 for an individual and $22,350 for a family of four) will need the subsidies (Gruber and Perry 2011). Many poor families do not report all income, especially what they earned in cash, and they borrow from others and use their savings for consumer goods, which leads to the conclusion that most people can afford health insurance (Gruber and Perry 2011).

This may well not be true, of course, since the levels of real poverty in the U.S., particularly for minorities, are usually underestimated. From a moral and ethical perspective, Canada's single payer system is far preferable to the American system based on private insurance. Even from an economic point-of-view, the U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other Western nation, but has never in its history achieved universal coverage.

In Massachusetts and other states that have passed laws requiring the purchase of private health insurance, which is also the core of Obama.