Health Care Reform : The Affordable Care Act

When president Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, it came with a lot of new provisions that would vary when they would come into effect. The very first provision was the “Grandfather Clause” which allowed people to keep their insurance plan before the act went into effect. As long as the employer still offered that plan the employee could still maintain it because they were grandfathered into receiving that coverage. If someone bought an insurance plan after March 2010 they would not be considered under the Grandfather Clause. Thus, these individuals would be required to get a new plan by 2014 if their plan did not meet all the criteria, they would need to get a new plan that fills all the criteria. Another major provision of the Affordable Care Act is that patients have a guaranteed issue. This means that insurance companies are unable to deny anybody health insurance based on their health or prior health. This may create a problem because the risk pool of an insurance company may not have the best people. Eventually, this could lead to the majority of the risk pool for an insurance company to have people who are at a greater risk of needing health insurance. This will make the insurance company more vulnerable and the only way that they will be able to cover the losses is by raising the premiums on everyone even though there may be some individuals that are in perfect health. The next provision that was added under the Affordable Care Act is that the

The Affordable Care Act is President Obama’s new solution to provide healthcare coverage to uninsured Americans. The theory is that millions of uninsured Americans will get access to affordable health insurance through the government. The Affordable Care Act reforms Medicare. You cannot be dropped from coverage when you get sick. You cannot be denied coverage or treatment for being sick. You also cannot be charged more for being sick. Although these are all mostly the positive sides to the Affordable Care Act there are many negative. Since you cannot be dropped for being sick, it will make the prices for everyone’s insurance go up. Also, since so few young and healthy Americans have signed up, the math used to create the program is not adding up. Because there is so much confusion surrounding the specifics of the ACA, the Affordable Care Act keeps getting delayed. The Obama administration announced another delay on

The Affordable Care Act, often referred to as the ObamaCare was signed into law on March 23, 2010. It has created a lot of controversy since its debut. The Healthcare reform will affect all Americans. The issue has many Americans believing it is a great thing for our country while others believe it is a terrible idea and then of course there are those who don’t know what to think. By Jan 1, 2014 Americans will be required to purchase a health care policy or will have to pay a penalty. Ready or not it’s happening. First you would have to understand the background information of the program. As with all things there are pros and cons to the Affordable Care Act. Because it is a new law it is not flawless there is room for changes and recommendations.

There are a lot of negative problems that will arise from ObamaCare. The idea of increased coverage is great, but it will end up making health care costs rise even higher. These health care costs rise higher, because more and more people are taking advantages of the tests and screenings that they can now take. Not only with it cost more to get health care, but it is going to raise the amount of money we pay for taxes every year to help fund for Medicare and Medicaid. Glenn Kessler states that “Many of the law’s new taxes, including a Medicare surcharge and taxes on investments for the wealthy, take effect this year. That’s a total of $1 trillion between 2013 and 2022.” (Kessler, 1). That’s a trillion more dollars in taxes families across the U.S will struggle to pay for, all for health insurance. ObamaCare also has the potential of hurting a lot of employees. The Affordable Care act has a requirement that employers provide health insurance, which is causing them to either fire employees completely or begin to cut their hours. Employers will soon or already have begun to cut before 30 hours, where the requirement kicks in, so they no longer have to provide their employees with health care insurance. This causes people to look for two part time jobs instead of just having one, full-time job.

Several new taxes were created in order to pay for the ACA. Also additional taxes were created for people with higher incomes, seeing as they had plenty of money they wouldn’t mind sharing some of the wealth with the rest of the country. But of course they did mind, they didn’t see how this could possibly be fair that they had to give up a larger percentage of their income in order to pay for others health insurance. Another major con for requiring American citizens to have health-insurance is that businesses are cutting employee hours in order to avoid having to pay for employees health-insurance. Of course businesses aren’t going to want to pay for all of their employee’s health-insurance, to avoid this they cut hours. This isn’t helping those people who have those jobs. They need to be able to work full-time and need to be able to have health coverage. This is a major con and doesn’t benefit those at all who don’t have full-time

The Affordable Care Act makes it possible for the US population to have access to low cost health insurance. It also protects individuals from being dropped from coverage when they get, be denied treatment, or get charged more for being sick. The main problem is that many people don’t like the mandate because taxes are heavy on people with high incomes and on the healthcare industry. Since the system is private it can also be confusing and customers risk themselves paying more or less money. The higher the price individuals pay the better the quality. Insurance establishments are forced to cover sick

This delay of the employer mandate may have repercussions for the individual mandate. It may have influence on the federal spending and revenues. One potential repercussion may be a worse than predictable number of small businesses who will offer insurance plans to their employees. This will result in a greater number of employees who will become eligible for tax credits in 2014 and an surge in the amount of uninsured (Congressional Budget Office, October 1. 2013).

Many of today’s arguments within the American government have to do with health care. The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare or The ACA, has been effective since March 23, 2010. Most of Obamacare’s major provisions, such as mandated individual coverage, just took effect at the beginning of 2014. Democrats support the health care reform while a majority of republicans are entirely against it. On paper the health care reform looks good, but there are a lot of things that could potentially hurt the American population. Our founding fathers never had a debate over healthcare and frankly I don’t think it should be a topic of discussion today. The way healthcare has worked in the past is still working today and I see no reason to

The first article emphasizes that the act is probable to have a negative effect on job creation, as employers will feel that it is important for them to keep the number of their employees under 50 in order to avoid having to pay health care insurance. Even with

Several regulations imposed by governments can have an impact on organizations. Some regulations have more effect on certain types of industries than others. The Affordable Care Act does not necessarily affect a particular industry, but it does have consequences that could potentially affect business owners and their employees. Under this health reform, employers with 50 employees or more are required to pay health insurance for their employees or face a penalty. The Affordable Care Act limits the employer’s options in choosing low-cost insurance plans; this may cause businesses to raise costs and reduce the hours of work and/or the wages paid to their employees.

Small businesses with more than 50 full-time employees with an average annual wage above 250,000 must provide health coverage to full time employees come 2015. This is sometimes called “The employer mandate”. (Obama Care Facts). Obamacare employer mandate could be a downfall for the most non progressive future for many businesses. Not only will businesses have a hard time flourishing, but the new requirement makes it more expensive for businesses to hire workers in the future along with reducing full-time employees to part-time employees.

Just as the Affordable Care Act has it’s positive outcomes that can help many people, it also comes along with several downsides. The first downside is that the Affordable Care Act will not only raise taxes to help fund for it but it will affect many of the high earners because they will have to pay higher taxes. Not only that is an issue but will also hurt those middle class Americans that do not quite make enough but at the same time are not completely living in poverty. These people will be the most affected by the taxes because it will affect our American Citizens directly. Also, these taxes are not quite specified but it is stated that even larger firms will have to pay a larger sum of money due to the taxes being enforced with the Affordable Care Act. They will begin to see a negative financial effects as well as their employees because they will also be held accountable to get those taxes take from their paychecks so they too will see a negative financial effect. Quite Frankly, that is a very tough to happen to employers and employees because they work hard to make ends meet and if additional taxes are going to be added to their paychecks to deduct more of their pay it can really hurt the employee as well as their family.

First, the individual mandate requires individuals to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty tax. There are exemptions but these do not apply to our clients or their employees, as the facts have been presented. The practical effect of this for our clients, is that each owner and employee must have health insurance. This leaves each individual with two options, purchases his or her own insurance or the company buys a health insurance plan for the employees. Going without health insurance is hardly an option given the harsh penalties imposed under the ACA. At this point in time, the penalty is the greater of (1) $695 per individual and $347.50 per child (up to a maximum of $2,085 per family) or (2) 2.5 percent of the family’s income.

The individual mandate under the ACA, forces every individual to acquire health coverage and failure to abide by this provision may result to a monetary penalty. This individual mandate was made necessary to expand the health market and secure its capital in order to pay towards the care of the sick majority. However, the result of this expansion was a shock, especially to the young and healthy individuals who were schedule to pay massive amounts of dollars for health coverage that they may or may not even use. This alone has crashed public expectation in gaining "affordable" health coverage.

The most controversial aspect of the legislation culminated in ACA’s employer mandate because it poses considerable implications on American businesses. The employer mandate’s first major implication is that it requires businesses to offer affordable health insurance coverage to employees as well as their dependents up to the age of 26. Depending on the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) employees hired by a business, compliance has been set to begin within the next two years. By 2016, employers with 50 or more FTE employees must begin to provide coverage for their full-time employees while employers with 100 or more FTEs are required to have insured up to 95 percent of their full-time workforce. [Obamacare Facts] In addition, health insurance offered by employers under these provisions must meet the affordability and minimum value requirements. Coverage is considered to be affordable if the costs do not exceed 9.56 percent of an employee’s household income and provide a minimum value equal to the average cost sharing rate of 60 percent. [Obamacare Facts]