'Obamacare' questions

[DevotedDemocrat]

What exactly did the 2010 healthcare reform do? It seems kind of hard to understand exactly what t did. Can someone explain in layman' sterns, so to speak, what the ACA does?

Also, why do people refer to it as 'Obamacare'? Did the reform actually create a new health insurance program similar to Medicare and Medicaid?

[Lief 🗽]

In a nutshell, the ACA had four goals:

1) Expand health coverage to all legal US residents,
2) Provide greater consumer protections to people with insurance,
3) Improve the quality of medical care, and
4) Bring down healthcare costs.

To do this, the law did six things:

1) Medicaid expansion,
2) Health insurance exchanges,
3) Individual mandate,
4) Employer incentives to provide coverage,
5) Insurance protections for consumers, and
6) Quality of care and cost-saving reforms.

(this is based on a powerpoint at a lecture I attended given by one of the professors at my school; I can email the full presentation to you if you want)

[AggregateDemand]

To understand what it does, you have to understand the current/old system. The US used income exclusions to make employer-provided healthcare a form of tax free income. Obviously, everyone wants more tax free income so people were pushing for higher premiums. Price inflation was the result. People who didn't get healthcare through work got screwed by the employer-directed system. Uninsured people placed bigger burden on the insured, which created more uninsured people.

ACA reintroduces taxes to the healthcare system to discourage profligate spending on premiums. It imposes an individual mandate, and then expands Medicaid to avoid crippling the poor. Public exchanges are used to reduce marketing costs for private companies, and the government defines the level of minimum acceptable coverage. At some point, employers will be required to provide healthcare for all employees over 29 hours, but that provision is so bad it's been delayed on numerous occasions.

Despite good intentions, ACA is inadequate because it does very little to reduce costs. It also wastes time and energy trying to redistribute wealth with clumsy provisions, and it keeps people dependent upon their employers.

[fartboy]

What exactly did the 2010 healthcare reform do? It seems kind of hard to understand exactly what t did. Can someone explain in layman' sterns, so to speak, what the ACA does?

Also, why do people refer to it as 'Obamacare'? Did the reform actually create a new health insurance program similar to Medicare and Medicaid?

It gave the government access to our medical records for one. This means that if you have an embarrassing medical condition, the government has access to it. Have you noticed that most people signing up for Obamacare were already insured? If anything it made the rich richer and the poor are still just as poor.