The Affordable Care Act ( Aca )

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a health reform law that was signed by President Barrack Obama on March 23, 2010. The full name of the law is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). One week later the President also signed a law called the Health Care Education and Reconciliation Act (HCERA), which was a supplement that made several changes the PPACA. What the country currently refers to as the ACA or "Obamacare" is both of these laws combined. (McDonough, 2012)

For this reaction paper, I have chosen the topic of whether or not I believe that the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) should be repealed, replaced with something else, or stay in its current form. I believe that Obama Care should be fully repealed. However, I don’t believe that just repealing this legislation is enough. I believe that there should be a series of reforms ready for implementation that follow free market principles and that will restore economic freedom.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was created by President Obama back in March 2010 to help reduce healthcare costs and improve healthcare quality for uninsured Americans. The ACA was implemented to reduce the cost that was growing with Medicare and Medicaid because they have increased over the years threatening the entire federal budget (Amadeo, 2017). People who are not working and are unable to cover their healthcare expenses usually end up on Medicaid which is paid for by the government. The others who are over the age of 65 are on Medicare and have their premiums supported by the federal government. However, people who make too much money or who are too young to qualify for either

Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) signed into law in March 2010, a few things have changed in the provision of physical therapy services, in specific productivity standards and reimbursement in outpatient physical therapy clinics. The Affordable Care Act has resulted in an increased demand for physical therapy services primarily due to the construction of the Health Insurance Marketplace. This created new health insurance options to help Americans acquire health insurance, who previously were not able to afford it. Although the ACA is a very extensive and complex piece of legislation, it has ultimately resulted in more individuals who are eligible for physical therapy services. This increased demand not only comes from the ACA but also from reimbursement cuts from insurance companies, subsequently causing physical therapists to overload their schedules as a means to offset these cuts. These demands are without factoring in the aging baby boomer population, which is expected to increased the physical therapist need by 30% from 2008 to 2018 (cite). Physical therapy is about providing the best patient care, however patient care is also a business and businesses are centered on revenue. Below are some of the current proposed solutions along with personal solutions and insight on the productivity issue.

Primary care access is a growing concern for all Americans and the reason behind this concern is an imbalance between demand for care and capacity to provide care. Demand is growing as the population expands, ages, and faces chronic illnesses and the capacity is shrinking as the ration of primary care clinicians to population drops (Ghorob & Bodenheimer, 2012). A primary goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to improve access to quality health care for uninsured Americans, largely through public and private insurance expansions (Polsky et al, 2015). At the same time, the architects of the law recognized the need to increase the availability of primary care providers to meet the increased demand for health care (Pg. 538, 2015).

The Affordable care act (ACA), all so known as Obamacare, was signed into law on March 23, 2010. The ACA said that every taxpayer must have health insurance, if they have not enrolled by the deadline they will face a penalty of having to pay for not having health insurance. People were told that with the ACA that health insurance would be more affordable and for some it did but for others it changed what they already had and they can no longer afford to have insurance. Ilyma Somin wrote that because of the Commerce, Tax and the Necessary and Proper Clause because basically they say that ACA offers economic effects in some way or another (Somin, 2012).

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law early spring of 2010. It’s probably the most comprehensive reform we’ve seen in the United States healthcare system within the last forty four years. Although the law was put into effect, the features of the new law took effect in 2014. The Affordable Care Act changed the non insurance group market in the United States, mandates most residents to have health insurance, considerably expand public insurance and subsidize private insurance, while raising revenue from a variety of new taxes. Projecting the impacts of the health care system will be challenging, but related estimates were required for the legislative process, and conducted by the Congressional Budget Office.

Societal beliefs and values influence the Affordable Care act. The health care budget is under constraint, how to provide the most recent and enhanced health care while saving money has become a major issue. With this new health reform, millions of Americans who could not afford insurance with their employers or are uninsured due to lack of employment have the opportunity to become insured. The major economic change in this society has created enormous challenges for workers, families, as well as employers. The implementation of this act reduced this plague in the health delivery system.

The primary social problem that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted to address was for everyone to have insurance. The goal was to make insurance accessible to everyone and decrease the number of people without health insurance. The most important provisions of the law were preventive care, birth control, and prohibit exclusion of an individual with preexisting conditions, and Medicaid expansion. They addressed these problems by covering all well visits, making birth control free, allowing people with preexisting conditions get the help they need, and expanding Medicaid for the childless adults that are poor. According to Sanger-Katz and Bui (2016), the uninsured rate has gone down but there have been some difficulties with the Medicaid

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) is commonly referred to as Obamacare. This pseudo name or nickname initially assigned to the program as a criticism of now former President Obama's efforts to stabilize healthcare at a national level, but it has since become the most widely accepted for the ACA. There are many cited reasons for opposition to the program, including the concern it presents the US government with an unnecessary control of public healthcare benefits.

The highest court in all of America is the Supreme Court. They decide and uphold

America spends 2.5 times more on healthcare than most developed countries yet still ranking 51st in life expectancy in the world (Baum, 2015). The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was implemented January 1, 2014 by President Obama to expand coverage to millions of individuals in need. It consists of two separate pieces of legislation: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services, 2016). Although the ACA will give health benefits to millions of uninsured Americans, hospitals are receiving less compensation because of the high demand of health care from over qualified recipients. Through the Children’s Health Insurance Program and also the Social Security Act, states are able to pilot a test approach that could extend coverage up to 200 percent of the poverty line (Sommers, Kenney, & Epstein, 2015). Such a large increase in the size of the population that is now eligible to apply for the ACA comes with a sizable amount of fiscal responsibility from the states and puts an immense strain on the amount of money guaranteed to pay for the services provided (Sonier et al., 2013). Given the lack of funding from the Medicaid program, absence of reimbursement strategies, and budget of healthcare in America’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP),

Healthcare in the United States is in a crisis situation. Healthcare costs are rising to the point where people are required to pay their health insurance premiums and deductibles over having enough money to cover groceries to feed the family. It seems our government is at odds in terms of the success with the Affordable Care Act and the outcomes we are witnessing from its’ implementation in our country. Many Americans understand the incentives of having healthcare insurance coverage and the benefits it can provide. With so many more individuals entering the healthcare insurance marketplace due to the guidelines of the Affordable Care Act we also see an impact to the supply and demand of healthcare availability and healthy outcomes.

On the whole, the Affordable Care Act reduces healthcare costs while providing better quality services for citzens accross the US. Farley says that the ACA’s reforms to Medicare saved “17 billion in fiscal year 2013” thanks to reductions in payments to private health insurance companies cover their customers through Medicare Advantage as well as adjustments to the annual updates to Medicare provider rates (Farley, 2014). This protects consumers from excessive charges by their insurance providers, by limiting how much insurance providers spend on their own services. And even though the cost of health care, per capita, is gradually increasing, the rate of that growth has decreased over time, thanks to the stipulations, as well as method of implementations, of the ACA. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++=

In the U.S. “Decreasing the number of uninsured is the number one goal of the Affordable Care Act(ACA), which provides Medicaid coverage to many low-income individuals” (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2015, p.1). Despite the success of the ACA enrollment of millions of people with health insurance, the most at risk and pressing group of our population are our children. This is a group that needs our attention and their health should be the country’s number one priority. This is a vast difference from Canada, where every child has health care coverage for life because of its Universal Health Care. Bodenheimer and Grumbach (2013) noted that over the years, “reformers in the United States argued for the passage of a national health insurance program, government’s guarantee that every person is insured for basic health care”(p.187). But this effort was not only defeated time and time again, but it was constantly shoved under the rug. It was not until a great effort was pushed by President Obama that we started to see some changes in our health care system. Still a lot of work needs to be done, especially for our children. Stronger measures must be implemented to make sure that every child has an opportunity to live a long and healthy life. This is especially geared towards children living in rural areas, “where access to health care is especially low or non-existence” (Rosenblatt & Hart, 2000, p.1).