The ACA stands for the Affordable Care Act, which is much more commonly known as Obamacare, which has been the major piece of legislation trying to reform the health care system in the United States under Pres Obama.
The ACA or Obamacare, has generated a huge amount of publicity and created a huge amount of division among Americans for a wide variety of reasons. Some of them have to do with health, others have to do with the political structure of the United States, and possibly race as well.
One big part of the intent behind the ACA or Obamacare was to provide some type of health insurance coverage to a huge number of Americans who have none at all. Health care in the United States is essentially a private system, with people relying on health insurance to give them some type of coverage at an affordable level for all their health needs.
This ranges from visits to their primary physicians, through to emergency room visits, through to all types of inpatient and outpatient hospital and non-hospital visits.
It is an incredibly complex system, with the majority of people who have any type of health insurance obtain it through their work or employer. The costs involved are staggering, and the level of care that people receive varies hugely.
The ACA or Obama care had the intent of providing some type of health insurance coverage to those who were uninsured, and to standardise the health care plans that were available to make sure that there were a minimum set of standards for people.
Pre-existing Conditions
Another big content of the ACA or Obamacare was to prevent insurance companies precluding people from insurance, or charging them significantly more because of what is termed a pre-existing condition.
This means that if you apply for healthcare insurance and you already have a condition that you know effectively makes you a worse risk from the insurance company’s point of view, insurance companies under the ACA are not allowed to discriminate against you in anyway.
Whilst this last provision is hugely important, it does remain to be seen whether insurance companies try and get round it in other ways. Whilst they will presumably abide by the law, it does present quite a challenge from a purely insurance point of view, where risk is the determining factor as to what cover is provided to people and at what cost.
There are many other provisions of the ACA or Obamacare, perhaps one of the main ones being the establishment of online marketplaces, run effectively on a state-by-state basis, where people can sign in and see what insurance companies and what plans are available in the state where they live.
Some of these exchanges are run by the state themselves, and others are run by the federal government where the individual state has declined to participate.
