I was born, raised and live in the U.K. I am 24 years old. I remember, on the face of things, Obamacare being a step forward for the shenanigans which is the U.S. healthcare system. But, I often see posts stating it failed. Someone please explain 🙂
I hold our NHS in high regard. I cannot imagine a healthcare system which can leave people who have worked, paid taxes for 30 years+ and are all round good citizens in financial ruins. What exactly is Obamacare and why do people say it failed?
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Oh boy. Strap yourself in British friend, this is going to take a while.
Obamacare was the popular name for an acts passed by the US Congress and signed into law by Obama in 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (often shortened to Affordable Care Act or ACA if you don’t like calling it Obamacare). This did a lot of shit, and most people on either side of the issue don’t know what the hell they’re talking about most of the time, but I’ll try and cover the major highlights.
There were a lot of regulatory changes, such as the FDA being given authority to approve generic drugs, and drug manufacturers being given a 12 year exclusive license on drugs they develop before a generic can be introduced. Restaurants (specifically chains of 20 or more locations) were required to show the calorie content of every item on their menus, although this part was dependent on further regulations by the FDA that I don’t believe ever came to pass, many large chains got ahead of the curve and started doing it anyway. A 10% sales tax was placed on indoor tanning salons. And dozens more.
But the big one, the one that everybody thinks of when they think of the ACA/Obamacare, the insurance changes. I assume that you’re aware that unlike your own and many other countries, the US doesn’t have a universal socialized healthcare system, and we’re not here to argue the pros or cons of our system vs. yours or anybody else’s. Some people look at the ACA as an attempt to create such a system, but that is absolutely incorrect. Instead, it was a combination of regulation over the health insurance industry (banning lifetime or annual limits on spending for hospital stays and other essential benefits, requiring that children be allowed to remain covered by their parents’ insurance until age 26, even if they’re no longer dependents, a prohibition on denying coverage or charging more to insure a person with a pre-existing condition, and many others), along with an expansion of eligibility for Medicaid (something at least conceptually similar to socialized healthcare, but limited to low-income individuals), although states had to opt-in to this expansion and many did not, combined with the creation of healthcare exchanges allowing people to shop around for insurance coverage, which was necessary because it was now (as of 2014), mandatory for all Americans to obtain health insurance, under penalty of something that was absolutely not a tax, because they couldn’t legally do that, but was an additional sum of money collected from you by the IRS at tax time because it was absolutely a tax.
Suffice to say that this came from the right place in the heart, there were a lot of good ideas and many of the regulatory changes were helpful, but it didn’t help with any of the problems it was designed to fix, and is a major contributing factor to the election of Donald Trump, whose platform included dismantling the ACA.
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