Evaluation Argument on the Affordable Care Act

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Evaluation Argument on the Affordable Care Act
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Obamacare is a health care policy, which was passed in March 2010. The main aims of the law were to increase health insurance coverage, protect Americans from exploitation by insurance organizations, and reduce the overall healthcare cost (Movarec 10). The law required all citizens to obtain a health insurance failure to which individuals would be required to pay tax penalties. During the whole legislation process, the ACA was a highly controversial bill and has continued to be among the highly debated laws in the United States. The ACA has been highly successful in reducing the uninsured persons in the U.S., increasing access to medical care, increasing the affordability of medical access, and is the best health care law the U.S. has ever had.
Although there were other healthcare policies in the United States before the ACA, like Medicare, and Medicaid, the number of Americans who were uninsured was very high. In 2010 the year, which the ACA was enacted, the United States has around 49.9 million citizens uninsured who represent approximately 16.3 percent of the population. The number had been rising from nearly 31 million in 1987 to 49.9 million in 2010 (Movarec 15). Research shows that while the number of uninsured persons continued to increase significantly, the percentage of the American population has been growing relatively slow since the 1980s. The research implies that the health care policies that were employed during that period were ineffective at increasing health care coverage by targeting the appropriate subgroup of the American population. The ACA has been successful in decreasing the uninsured people in the U.S. In the period between 2010 and 2014, the number of uninsured persons fell from 49.9 million to 33.0 million while the rate decreased from 16.3 to 10.4 percent (Movarec 18). The ACA has achieved the most significant change in the uninsured population throughout the history of the U.S.
The 2010 Act provides Americans with improved access to preventive medical programs. A primary strategy to achieve increased preventive services is eliminating cost as a hindrance to the programs. Health plans after 2010 were required to cover the recommended preventive programs without incurring extra prices to the beneficiary. After the implementation of the ACA, the number of adults who have been accessing preventive services has increased substantially. A high number of young adults either did not attend the preventive programs or were late to receive the services due to cost (Sommers et al. 166). However, after the inclusion of these services in the necessary health care cover, the numbers of youths who do not attend these programs have reduced substantially over the years. In particular, Medicaid expansion after the ACA reported a 6.6 percent increase in preventive care such as cancer screenings, vaccinations, and dental checkups. Low-income adults are among the beneficiaries of Medicaid (Sommers et al. 167). A comparison of two states, one expansion, and the other non-expansion, reported that the reforms after the ACA resulted in increased outpatient medical visits, caring for chronic illnesses, and preventive care services. Similar to the pre-ACA improvements, Obamacare has also encouraged the use of outpatient and preventive services.
Increasing access to care for all sub-groups of the American population is a primary goal of the ACA. The ACA allowed young adults of below twenty-six years to be covered in their parents’ covers, which hav...