In March 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law (Courtemanche et al., 2018). The goal of this law was to make health insurance more accessible and affordable for everyone, as well as to try to keep the cost of health care down and offer other health incentives. In 2017, Trump tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, but Congress was able to get rid of the tax penalty for people who didn’t have health insurance.
I had insurance before the Affordable Care Act. I got my first job when I was seventeen, but I couldn’t actually work until I was eighteen. But I’ve always had health insurance through my job, and I’ve always been pretty healthy, so I only went to the doctor once a year for a checkup. When the Affordable Care Act was first passed, I didn’t know what the big problems were with it. But I do think we should keep the Affordable Care Act because it lets people stay on their legal guardian’s health plan until they are 26 years old instead of 19 years old, which was the case before (Zhao et al., 2020). The Affordable Care Act should stay the same because it doesn’t make any distinctions based on medical conditions. People will be allowed to join a health plan even if they have a health problem that has already been diagnosed (Zhao et al., 2020). I think this is especially important for kids with cancer who are too old to stay on their parents’ health insurance plan and for adults who had cancer as kids.
The Affordable Care Act has a lot of good things about it, but it also has some bad things that could be changed. Some insurance companies have cut down on the number of providers they work with and the types of health specialties they cover. There are “in network” providers and “out of network” providers, for example. Personally, my insurance will only pay for care from providers in my network. If I needed care from a provider outside of my network, my provider would give me a referral, but I would have to pay more for a treatment that would have been cheaper with a provider in my network. The law should be changed to give more providers a reason to join the network. The Affordable Care Act should also be changed because it is not as “affordable” as it said it would be. This care act only helps younger people because older and retired people have to pay higher premiums and overall high deductibles that they can’t afford on a fixed income (Foster & Murray, 2021).
Courtemanche, C., Marton, J., Ukert, B., Yelowitz, A., Zapata, D., & Fazlul, I. (2018). The three-year impact of the Affordable Care Act on disparities in insurance coverage. Health Services Research, 54(S1), 307–316. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6773.13077
Foster, H., & Murray, M. (2021). A sensible solution: How the affordable care act can insure more young Invincibles. Forefront Group. https://doi.org/10.1377/forefront.20210604.467869
Zhao, J., Mao, Z., Fedewa, S. A., Nogueira, L., Yabroff, K. R., Jemal, A., & Han, X. (2020). The Affordable Care Act and access to care across the cancer control continuum: A review at 10 Years. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, 70(3), 165–181. https://doi.org/10.3322/caac.21604
