ACA Strengths, Weaknesses, and Health Care Reform Ideas
This paper examines the Affordable Care Act (ACA), evaluating its key strengths—most notably expanding health coverage to approximately 20 million Americans—alongside its significant weaknesses, including continued reliance on subsidization, bureaucratic restrictions, and a treatment-over-prevention orientation. The paper argues that while the ACA's intentions were laudable, its policies inadvertently perpetuated rising costs and undermined care quality. Drawing on sources from Health Affairs and The Atlantic, the author proposes reforms centered on ending government subsidies, promoting preventive medicine, and fostering genuine market competition as the most effective path toward improving access, quality, and affordability in American health care.
- Introduction: Overview of ACA's scope and paper's purpose
- Strengths and Weaknesses of the ACA: Coverage gains undercut by subsidization and bureaucracy
- How I Would Improve the Current Health Care System: Ending subsidies and promoting preventive medicine
- Conclusion: Access, quality, and cost require structural reform
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its policy critique in direct statutory citations (ACA, 2010, Sec. 1204) alongside peer-reviewed journal sources, lending credibility to its argument.
- It uses a consistent analogy—comparing government subsidization in health care to its effects in higher education and housing—to make an abstract economic argument concrete and accessible.
- The central thesis is self-critical: the paper identifies the ACA's greatest proclaimed strength (coverage expansion) as simultaneously its greatest structural weakness, which creates a coherent and memorable argumentative arc.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of counter-argument acknowledgment followed by rebuttal. When proposing the elimination of government subsidies—a politically unpopular position—the author anticipates the reader's objection ("millions more people will have no access to care") and directly addresses it, explaining why the long-term structural effect would be the opposite. This move strengthens the argument by showing awareness of competing perspectives.
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a clear four-part structure: a brief introduction framing the ACA and the paper's scope; a balanced strengths-and-weaknesses analysis of the Act; a substantial reform proposal section organized around three interconnected policy levers (ending subsidies, promoting prevention, enabling competition); and a conclusion that synthesizes the access-quality-cost triad. The reform section carries the most argumentative weight and is the paper's analytical core.
Introduction
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, set about reforming the health care system in America in order to enable more people to obtain access to health care. The ACA arrived with a number of strengths and weaknesses. Altogether, the Act affected patients' access to and quality of health care, and it also impacted the cost of care system-wide. This paper discusses the ACA's strengths and weaknesses while describing its impact on health care in America. It also provides a discussion of how the current health care system could be changed and improved from the standpoint of access, quality, and cost.
References
ACA. (2010). Sec. 1204, 124 STAT. U.S. Government Publishing Office. Retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ148/pdf/PLAW-111publ148.pdf
Alpert, A. et al. (2013). Giving EMS flexibility in transporting low-acuity patients could generate substantial Medicare savings. Health Affairs, 32(12), 2142–2148.
Eckstein, M. (2013). The ambulance industry struggles to go the distance. Health Affairs, 32(12), 2067–2068.
Goldhill, D. (2009). How American health care killed my father. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/
Jacobson-Vann, J. C. (2011). Slipping through the cracks of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention and Treatment Act of 2000—a tragic case of failed access to care. Journal of Nursing Law, 14(3), 96–106.
Somanader, T. (2016). A look at six years of the Affordable Care Act. Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/03/23/look-six-years-affordable-care-act
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