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Understanding The ACA Premiums Research Paper

Obamacare, or formally known as the Affordable Care Act, is a recent healthcare law that will reach its implementation stage in 2014. Healthcare is certainly a fundamental necessity and indispensable to a growing human population. The United States is known for its adequate healthcare, servicing low income people through Medicaid, and the elderly through Medicare. However, recent events have led to a shift in what can possibly negatively impact the healthcare system for the United States. Obamacare has good intentions in having its purpose be to supply affordable healthcare to everyone within the United States, but certain clauses and modifications have turned it into a dicey and uncertain situation. Not only are the costs piling up, and continue to increase, but the distribution of healthcare services is primarily execute through health insurance coverage. This means that there will be a change in how the healthcare system functions at the core level. Some acts have been passed to analyze and predict how Obamacare will affect the general American population.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010, served to investigate the significance of the Affordable Care Act's rules on preventative care. Preventative care as most know is meant to curb costs of healthcare by minimizing or lowering health risks that could become acute and chronic health problems. Some examples are Diabetes Type 2 and heart attacks which can be prevented by following a healthy lifestyle and maintaining a healthy BMI. Analysis of the insurance tiers will help paint a better picture of how Obamacare will impact healthcare as a whole. Higher premiums, buying and exchanging annual contracts, and competitive pricing can all be a part of Obamacare and can affect how much taxpayers as well as insurance payers pay for health insurance.

Understanding the Affordable Care Act Premiums

Introduction

The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is the new healthcare law that is coming into effect right now. The law contains a number of clauses which are transforming...

One aspect of the plan that is gaining the most publicity currently is the tiering system for health care plans. This has become a major issue and growing dilemma for the White House because many plans of the past did not meet the minimum criteria for the ACA (Kliff, 2013; Mangan, 2013).
Such inadequate plans have been cancelled, and replaced by better but more expensive plans, representing a significant increase in out-of-pocket costs for some people. This paper will examine some of the key details of the ACA, including the different tiers of the plans, in order to shed some light on a continually complex issue. The law is often intricate due to all the compromises and promises made by politicians, furthered by blind desires of the citizens they represent, so it can be difficult to sort it all. (John, 2013) It is important to look at various aspects of the act in order to determine an outcome.

Furthermore, many critics offer harsh judgment of the ACA without providing adequate information. Looking further at the facts and statistics described in Obamacare will help get a rounded look into the pros and cons of such an act. Proponents of the ACA state it will decrease government spending on healthcare overall because of the act's focus on preventative care. Opponents state the premiums will increase with little option to switch or elect a different health plan. Still the truth of it all lies in implementation, management and use of the act, which has still not been seen.

Investigation of the ACA's tiers will provide much needed insight into how the resources under the ACA will be distributed. It will also illuminate how under the act, doctors and hospitals will treat their patients with healthcare being standardized. Countries like Canada with universal healthcare often have long waitlists just to see certain doctors because more people are insured.

Literature Review

The topic of the ACA can be difficult to follow and requires research to see what the act will do and what its true purpose is. This review of literature focuses on a clear explanation of the four tier system, a clear understanding of the term subsidies, who will be affected by ACA, and understanding the risk involved within the ACA. The literature was guided by the following research questions:

1.…

Sources used in this document:
The way that Affordable Care Act works, however, is that plans that would have failed to meet the standards of Bronze plan can no longer be offered. Such plans were often popular with either poor people who could not afford a better plan, or young people who are unlikely to have to make a claim. For such individuals, the increase in their health premiums might be significant, and political opponents of the Act are making every effort to collect anecdotes from such people to use as scare tactics (Radnofsky, 2013). The reality is that most young people were almost always going to have to pay more, which in part explains why it is older people who have signed up for plans on the exchanges (Mangan, 2013).

Are there Risks to the ACA?

There also risks with the Act that could jeopardize the way the system works. John (2013) notes that if not enough people sign up, then insurance companies will make smaller profits. He does note that the signups at higher rates
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