Obama
Care
Obama Care as we all know is one of the most
controversial topics on the headlines today.
Not knowing a lot about it I made it my civic duty to get informed. I’m
not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. However I’m going to try to
cover a few points that I found frustrating.
The first frustrating point was the
most obvious, or at least I thought, to figure out. What is Obama Care?
“So what is ObamaCare
and what does it mean to you? There are really only a few things you need to
know about the Affordable Care Act.
• The Affordable Care Act contains over a thousand pages of
reforms to the insurance industry and the health care industry in order to cut
health care costs and to provide affordable health insurance to all Americans.
Despite its length and complexity, most of the important reforms are contained
within the first 140 pages. Check out our summary of the many titles and sections of the Affordable Care Act.”
I was disappointed to see that already they, the government, doesn’t
want us to know everything about the documents that inform us of what it
is. Also a simple explanation wasn’t what
I was going to get. This was a brief statement posted to give us the basics.
Number two item
on my list was what does it do for us? This question was even more struggling
to answer. I found one statement that sort of gave me an idea.
“• As of 2013 there are
around 44 million Americans who are unable to get health insurance.
The majority of uninsured are poor working families and those who simply cannot
afford health insurance. One of the major things ObamaCare
does is help these individuals to get health insurance through expanding
Medicaid and Medicare and offering cost assistance through health insurance marketplaces”
As I trudged thru
the numerous amounts of articles and statements and the media, I seemed to get
lost even more. At this point I wanted to know what exactly the hush-hush was
all about. Well I found a few quotes that were to give a briefing on the over-all
topic;
•” ObamaCare
offers a number of new
benefits, rights and protections including provisions that
let young adults stay on their plan until 26, stop insurance companies from
dropping you when you are sick or if you make an honest mistake on your
application, prevent against gender discrimination, stop insurance companies from
making unjustified rate hikes, do away with life-time and annual limits, give
you the right to a rapid appeal of insurance company decisions, expand coverage
to tens of millions, subsidize health
insurance costs, and require all insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions.
• The
fact is ObamaCare does not replace private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. If
you have health coverage you like, and it meets requirements
of the ACA, you can keep it.
• The "employer mandate" means come 2015 larger employers
will have to insure their full-time employees and their families or pay a per
employee fee. Learn more about the Employer Mandate.
• In 2013, the average annual total cost of employer-sponsored
family coverage was $16,351, and the share of the premium paid by workers was
29%. Between 2003 and 2013, premiums have increased by 80%.
• Small businesses can now get better benefits, cost-assistance
and better buying power to provide employee health insurance via the SHOP (part
of their State's Health Insurance Marketplace)
• Before the law you could be denied coverage or treatment because
you had been sick in the past, be charged more because you were a woman, be
dropped mid-treatment for making a simple mistake on your application, and had
little or no way to fight insurance company appeals. Today all Americans have
access to a large number of unprecedented new benefits, rights, and protections.”
I’m still not
sure on how this all of a sudden came into play with our current president. And
I don’t think that it was a bad idea in its entirety, but how did it come into
play? “President Obama may have signed the Affordable Care Act into law, but
the truth is ObamaCare is the result of decades of ideas from both sides of the
isle and the health care industry. The idea of an individual mandate was first
presented by current opponents of the law the Heritage Foundation in 1989.
ObamaCare itself was in fact modeled after "Romney Care", which is
the nickname for the health care reform law implemented in the State of
Massachusetts by then Governor Mitt Romney.”
I am still
confused if not more now than before, and I don’t have all the answers that I was
looking for. Then come to find out from
watching the senate debate on all of the; who, what, where, and how, no one even
read the entire thousand plus pages.
They are trying to point fingers at who didn’t follow thru with the
website that we paid billions of dollars to get up and running. I’m really tired of the nonsense that has
been going on in the white house. We
just went thru a government shut down due to lack of cash flow. I’m seeing more and more every day where our
hard earned money as tax payers is going and personally I’m not impressed. Politics is always a great debate to get the
public going. Honestly I just wanted to know what was going on with this health
reform information that they so kindly set up for us. Maybe they should stop all the arguing and
pointing fingers and do their homework.
I thought that was what we paid them for anyway.
Now that I’m
beyond frustrated and confused, I'm thinking that maybe I should take a course
on how to decipher the government language. I wonder if this Obama Care would
pay for that?
http://obamacarefacts.com/whatis-obamacare.php
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