Health Care Affordable Care Act: A Case Study

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Introduction

Affordability has been a very serious health care issue that all Americans have faced over decades. During the last decade, increasing health care expenditure was a major problem for Americans in general, however, more for the uninsured as well as the underinsured persons who had to deep deeper into their pockets to pay for their health care costs. According to Karen Davis in her article, “Making Health Care Affordable for all Americans,” It was worrying as the number of the uninsured jumped 9.5% between the year 2000 and 2002 from (39.8 43.6) Million. Today, with the introduction of the Affordable Care Act otherwise known as the Obama care, insurance is more affordable for those who are insured. On the other hand, cost sharing
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According to Medicaid and Medicare services, $9,695 were spent for each man, woman as well as child within the country on health care in 2014 (Jost, 2016). This equals to $24,625 on average for every average household of 2.54 people. With United States’ median household income of $53,697 during the time, it means that the average household making median income utilized 46% of its income on health care (Jost, 2016). On the other hand, health care costs happen to be evenly distributed whereby 1% of America’s population is accountable for more than 21% of health care costs and 5% for half, in any given year. However, half of America’s population in any given year spends almost $0 on health care. As a result of such disparity in health care costs distribution, the U.S depends on health insurance, just like other developed …show more content…
Almost half of the funds America spends on health care come from the government: through Medicaid and Medicare programs. Both federal and state governments heavily subsidized coverage sponsored by employers through the exclusion of employer and employee contributions from being taxed. ACA has primarily increased access to health care coverage especially for high-cost persons by through prohibition of preexisting condition exclusions as well as health status underwriting and imposing definite issue & renewal requirements on underwriters (Niles, 2017). ACA also established programs that effectively move health care costs from persons with higher health care costs to persons with lower costs. It increased health insurance coverage affordability as well as health care affordability for Americans with lower incomes. Again, the Act imposed out-of-pocket limits as far as in-network sharing is concerned and brought yearly and lifetime coverage limits in all markets to an end (Obama, 2017). Despite all this, health care affordability remains a problem still for