Obama Care Debate

This past January, Donald J. Trump was made 45th President of the United States of America. In his message of radical change to an overtly bureaucratic Washington that had supposedly failed the needs in providing for the American people, he promised to enact enormous reform in areas such as border security, foreign trade, and terrorism. Yet, for President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, it is now in their hands how the nation will face perhaps its first biggest challenge this year concerning the issue of national healthcare reform. With Obamacare slowly veering into an economic death spiral due to issues like spiking premiums, large corporate health insurers pulling out of federal marketplaces, and the development of insurance

However, President Trump and high-ranking Republican officials promise that a replacement for Obamacare would be enacted in possibly the same week or perhaps the same bill that also repeals Obamacare. In addition, Trump’s new pick for the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, signals that for whatever method of action is taken to address the disparity of health coverage in the U.S., the elimination of regulations in health care will be vastly exercised. The divide on healthcare reform between Republicans and Democrats spans numerous issues related to what should and shouldn’t be covered. While no specific plan has been proposed to replace Obamacare, topics like coverage vs. access, health savings accounts, and pre-existing conditions will help to define whatever plan is put forth. As with Obamacare, the replacement will have both winners and losers that result from its implementation. The actual process for repealing and replacing Obamacare will also come with challenges as the current, contentious political climate has made it almost impossible to establish bipartisan agreement on any national

For Obamacare, its mission was to make sure that all Americans were able to obtain health insurance. One of its main tenets was to allow those seeking individual coverage to obtain it, while also expanding Medicaid to allow increased numbers of low-income adults to be covered. In addition, a mixture of incentives and penalties was used to influence people to sign up for coverage through a federal marketplace. Republicans contrast this idea of universal coverage with the concept of “universal access,” in which health insurance can be obtained more easily as a result of lower premiums that would make coverage more affordable, thereby allowing more people to buy policies. Any Republican healthcare plan would also argue that compared to Obamacare, which required insurers to cover numerous benefits that were previously hard to find in individual healthcare plans such as maternity care and mental health, plans should give the insuree the choice of what benefits they would want, thereby lowing the cost of premiums and allowing consumers to be conscientious of what services they actually need in order to keep health care costs down. Republican plans will also incorporate the use of health savings accounts (HAS), a popular device that can allow one to deposit money that would be untaxed and directed toward healthcare costs for high-deductible insurance plans.