Bridging the Gulf on Healthcare Policy Beyond the Affordable Care Act

The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act (Aca): Obamacare

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly called Obamacare, was signed into law on the 1^st day of March 2010. According to Gaffney and McCormick (2017), before the passage of Obamacare, one in every six Americans had no health care insurance coverage. Discrimination by insurance companies against more vulnerable groups like the old, women, and the grievously ill was pervasive, and racial injustices in insurance access and coverage persisted. Limited access to health care for many Americans resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths annually, coupled with financial ruin and incapacitating agony for several more people. This perhaps summarizes the evident challenges that Obamacare sought to overcome via policy. The ACA was aimed at achieving several objectives, such as enabling un-insured and under-insured persons to secure insurance coverage through Medicaid expansion, expanding access to health care services, and increasing the opportunity for positive health outcomes for this category of persons. Other objectives included improvement in the quality of health care, reduction in the growth rate of healthcare expenditure, and accessibility to health care services to vulnerable groups such as pregnant women and children (Schader, 2015).