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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The US has an insurance based healthcare system. You buy private healthcare insurance. One problem with that is that if you have preexisting conditions, no one will insure you. This means that you only get emergency treatment (as ER rooms have to treat you), and when you do you go bankrupt because of the cost, which never really gets covered anyway.
Many Demorats would love to introduce some form of universal healthcare, particularly single payer (ie: the government pays for everyone to get healthcare). Many Republicans hate that idea and strongly oppose it. Obamacare was a compromise, somewhat based a plan put forward by the conservative Heritage Foundation as an alternative to single payer.
It has several main points which are crucial:
– No restrictions on pre-existing conditions. This means that people are both a) able to get coverage even if they have disabilities or chronic illnesses, and b) that when someone gets sick, they have some leverage with their provider.
– Subsidisation for those on low income: This allows everyone to get coverage. A big part of this was medicaid expansion, which is government provided. I think there were other measures as well to make it affordable.
– Universal requirement: Everyone has to get healthcare. This is crucial, as it means that the cost of healthcare is spread over everyone. Otherwise, healthy people don’t get insurance until they get sick, so don’t pay in until they are ill.
– Minimal coverage requirements: This is crucial for the same reason as universal requirement, otherwise healthy people would get cheap useless plans and sick people would have to pay insanely high rates.
However, Republicans did a lot of things to kill it.
– Several Republican states opted out of the medicaid expansion, leaving lots of people struggling to get insurance.
– The Republicans effectively removed the universal requirement by setting the penalty for not getting insurance to $0.
– Ended schemes to subsidise insurance for those on low income.
There’s a lot of other details, but that’s the basic gist.
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