Affordable Care Act: Case Study

Hetaf Alhariry

1. Describe two to three performance measures that an analyst could use to assess the effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act. The New York Times article discusses several.

Three measures that can assess whether the Affordable Care Act has been effective would be as follows: the decrease in uninsured, the improvement of health, and the decreasing cost of insurance.

Decrease in uninsured – In general, the Affordable Care Act has reduced uninsured rates by overall 25% [New York Times]. According to Gallup polls, “Gallup has recorded a drop in the percentage of American adults without insurance from 18 percent in mid-2013 to 13.4 percent by the end of May” [ibid]. Three to four million adults became new recipients of health insurance as a matter of the law.

Improvement of health – “… Most experts say it is too soon to tell … the ability of more people to get mammograms, colonoscopies or just routine checkups […]” [NYT]. However, the law makes young Americans fall under their parents’ insurance coverage up to 26 years old, rather than the previous practice of 19 years. This offers young Americans seven more coverage years before they embark on being covered under their own plans. As such, the rate of young Americans going for

specialized medical checkups have increased, and this activity correlates to early disease detection, and leads to improved health standards.

Decreasing cost of insurance – 7.3 million Americans who previously could not afford insurance have since been able to sign up for it after the passing of the Affordable Care Act. This is only made possible through government subsidizing of the premiums that artificially decrease the price tags handed to qualified recipients. The premiums, however, increased in 145 markets, 58 of which have double-digit percentage increases. Only 17 markets show decline rates.

2. Based on the measures you selected and the information presented in the two articles, how would you evaluate the effectiveness of the law to date? Why might this be a difficult question to answer?

I think the law is effective but the implementation is problematic. First of all, there is nothing wrong to make medical insurance accessible to all walks of life. The potential cost of bearing with an unhealthy nation far outweighs the cost to subsidize or implement it.

The law is effective when we see the number of formerly-uninsured people brought in to coverage has greatly increased. When coverage extends to young people particularly, the overall cost of medication throughout one’s life can be reduced because health is easier to gain when young.

The implementation or mechanism of execution of this law is a shame.

Obamacare, a government initiative, is based upon an existing fact in America called ‘privatized medical service’. Obamacare has to work along the lines of private businesses – hospitals and insurers in this sense – in order to carry out a government objective. Medical price tags have not actually changed. Rather they have increased citing that government is now freely subsidizing millions of young Americans. The power of price tagging still belongs to the private sector but the access of funds leads to government coffers. I think the implementation as it stands today is a disaster, promoting inefficient government spending and medical

racketeering.

This is a difficult question to answer, especially when it touches the topic of rights. The imposing of fines on those who opt out seems to make freedom of choice a crime. To date, individuals or companies who opt out are made to pay a fine of refusal to cover employees under the regulation of the Affordable Care Act. The mandatory nature of the law unnecessarily increases business costs to many establishments, reducing their profit margins and leading to a reduction of workers. This still does not solve the problem because when the prices are not controlled, insured employees are led back to the problem of unaffordable medical care (even post-subsidy). In certain areas, only a single insurance provider exists, creating a mini-monopoly of insurance services, thereby having the one-way power to influence prices (profiteering).