Healthcare Reform By Signing The Affordable Care Act ( Aca )

A newest way to finance health care now days is the health care reform which it is also called Obama Care. The Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010. The main objective behind the Affordable Care Act was to ensure that affordable health care insurance was available to every U.S citizen. This law is an extensive document that contains many regulations and laws that relate not only to health care but also to the regulation of insurance companies. One of the best known regulations is that group health plans can no longer put limitations or deny benefits to individuals under the age of 19 due to pre-existing conditions and individuals under the age of 26, are now eligible to be covered under their parents’

The US pays twice as much yet lags other wealthy nations in such measures as infant mortality and life expectancy, which are among the most widely collected, hence easily compared, international statistics. Many people are underinsured, for example, in Colorado "of those with insurance for a full year, 36.3% were underinsured."[6][7] About 10.7 million insured Americans spend more than a quarter of their annual paychecks on health care because of the high deductible polices.[8]

Rising health insurance premiums have made healthcare unaffordable in the United States. Health insurance premiums in this country have undergone a steady rise over the past few years while incomes have remained the same. More than 50% of individuals with low incomes holding private insurance in the United States are unable to afford their healthcare costs (Collins, Gunja, Doty & Buetel, 2015). In addition, costs related to healthcare are equally unaffordable to 25% of working-age individuals who hold private health insurance policies (Collins et al., 2015). According to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research and Educational Trust (Kaiser/HRET) survey on employer health benefits, employer-sponsored health insurance plans have also had moderate rises in premiums in 2013 for both individuals and family coverage (Claxton et al., 2013). While

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a healthcare program created by president Obama’s administration. The goal of the Affordable Care Act is to make sure every United States citizen has health insurance. The Affordable Care Act provides “affordable” health insurance plans to citizens that do not have any and make about $15,000 a year. While the idea of providing health insurance to the millions of American’s that cannot afford it is great, everything comes at a cost. According to Emily Miller, Obamacare is causing people’s health insurance premiums to rise by around 1 to 9 percent (Miller 15-15). Not only are insurance premiums rising, but ever since the Supreme Court declared the Affordable Care Act constitutional approximately 20 tax hikes have been approved (Battersby). All the aforementioned reasons are helping pay for Obamacare. Although providing health insurance for people that cannot afford it is important, the Affordable Care Act should be revoked because it will hurt the economy.

In 1954, Congress passed legislation allowing employers to provide health insurance benefits to employees on a tax-free basis (Sih and Singh 99). This legal provision marked the beginning of the rapidly expanding health care costs still apparent today due to the major incentives provided by the government to obtain employer-based health coverage. The overwhelming popularity of employer-based health insurance has led to a serious market inefficiency resulting from the system of third-party payment. As individuals rely on their insurance companies to pay for their medical expenses, this provides

In February 2017, the news was dominated by stories and video of town hall meetings with constituents telling their representatives stories of how the ACA had benefitted them or their loved ones in one way or another (Colliver, 2017). There is no doubt that the law has helped thousands, maybe even millions of people across the country. There have also been stories of individuals who have health insurance, but are unable to use it because of high deductibles, which effectively render the insurance policies these people hold emergency only plans (Luhby, 2016). This is most certainly an unintended consequence of a law that was written with good intentions, but which needs to be modified to work with the real life situations the citizens of this country are faced with.

Also, there is a high possibility of health insurance lobbying for their favored services to be included in the approved plans. The “Obamacare,” say opponents, imposes a hidden tax where those with health insurance will be required to pay for those without a health plan. “It is a way of taxing healthy people without calling it a tax.”

The probable impact of the Cadillac tax is causing employers to reassess the health care plans they offer their employees and reconsider their role in providing health care benefits to their employees in the future. Currently, this excise tax is proving to be a catalyst for change. However, regional differences in the cost of healthcare and unrelenting medical inflation is going to make the ability for employers to continually reduce benefit costs in an attempt to avoid the tax extremely

A dollar used for health benefits is worth more to an employee than a dollar in wages earned because the dollar in health benefits is not taxed and the dollar in wages earned is taxed. Thus, there it is a huge discount off the price of health insurance, and this happened very quietly and basically unnoticed by most. However, when health care was protected from these taxes, it immediately became of great value to employees, and companies benefited as they were able to keep it tax-free even after the war had ended

I am saddened that most Americans do not realize that employers and the government are not actually paying for most of their healthcare and healthcare benefits. I am even more bothered that politicians’ rhetoric about shared responsibility reinforces people’s misunderstandings instead of opening their eyes to how healthcare payment really works. I agree with the authors in that “The notion that someone else is paying for the insurance further reduces the incentive for cost control” (Emmanuel & Fuchs, 2008). We could work harder to help people understand that healthcare cost control is heavily reliant on the

We have seen over the timeline of development that both countries reacted differently to the outcomes of World War II. In the United States, the 1954 Internal Revenue Service Tax Code, in which the government codified into the law that companies can provide health insurance benefits to workers tax-free, is a reason for the difference. When healthcare was protected from taxes, it became very valuable to workers and companies. The result was that a dollar in health benefits is worth more to a worker than a dollar in wages, because the dollar in health benefits is untaxed and the dollar in wages is taxed. However, today, the health insurance tax break is the biggest in federal budget; the government loses out on $260 billion annually by not taxing health benefits (Kliff, 2015). The majority of non-elderly Americans get their health

Employer-based health insurance has been present in the United States for many years, however with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – future considerations must be deliberated. In the early years, during World War II, salaries were halted by the National War Labor Board. In order to entice workers and bypass the salary controls, companies would use employer-based health insurance. It was a positive situation for both, employee and employer because employer-based health insurance premiums paid by the employer was tax exempt (EBRI, 2015) and employees had the security of access to healthcare. Employers have the control and make the decision on which healthcare insurance plans their employees would have to choose from. However, the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) allows for many changes, including the ability for employees to have more freedom of choice. An analysis of employer-based health insurance and current trends reveals that the implementation of the PPACA will affect the employer-based health insurance existence, various advantages and disadvantages to group insurance, including adverse selection, moral hazard and uncertainty.

One of the primary goals of the Cadillac tax is to reduce the growing costs of national health care (Lowry 2015). The government is hopeful that implementation of the Cadillac tax will reduce overall health care expenditures and impede the growth of health care costs by encouraging a change in consumer behavior through discouraging the provision and obtainment of overly generous health coverage plans (Herring, 2011). Generally, individuals who are insured spend greater amounts on health care than those who are not as they can consume greater amounts of healthcare with a lesser personal burden. In the case that the insurance provided to an individual is overly generous, it encourages over spending on health care due to the fact that they incur a only a portion of costs of consumption. In this manner, the consumption of an inefficient amount of health care is perpetuated by the provision of overly generous health care coverage. This inefficiency and associated increase in demand for healthcare causes the price of healthcare to rise, which exacerbates the undesirable growth in national health care costs (Gravelle, 2015). The Cadillac tax aims to discourage the provision and obtainment of overly generous health care coverage by employers in an effort to decrease inefficient over-consumption of health care and stagnate the growth in healthcare costs. The intent of the Cadillac tax is to alter consumer behavior to decrease the provision of unnecessarily

Health care insurance attracted more people to work and keep existing employees during a labor shortfall. Health care insurance attracted people because business supported it and employees did not get taxes taken out their pay roll on healthcare benefits or social security. “The current tax code was health insurance premiums paid by employers are deductible for employers as a business expense, and are not included, without limit, from workers taxable income”.

Measuring the changes of health care spending is at the heart of health economics that aims to help policymakers and large employers alike in their search to optimally design and regulate the health insurance market. An optimal market such that it constrains the staggering growth of health care expenditures without significantly reducing the quality of health care consumed. Within the US, the authors find that the GDP has grown from about 5% to a confounding 17.4% in the past half century. Brot-Goldberg et al. seems to implicitly warn that such demand-side policy changes like the HDHP are likely to be counterproductive. The authors emphasize to their readers that the government needs to recognize the limit of cost-sharing coverage plans and focus more on the supply-side policies such as looking at how to properly