Even though we live abroad with minimal impact from ACA, here are some insightful ACA articles to handle holiday family discussions:
The Impact of Obamacare, in Four Maps
Over all, the gains are substantial: a seven-percentage-point drop in the uninsured rate for adults. But there remain troublesome regional patterns. Many people in the South and the Southwest still don’t have a reliable way to pay for health care, according to the new, detailed numbers from a pair of groups closely tracking enrollment efforts. Those patterns aren’t an accident.
Read the full New York Times article here.
Higher health-insurance premiums don’t mean the ACA is a disaster
But here is the good news. While health-care costs and premiums are rising — the recent announcement notwithstanding — they are rising much more slowly than they did during the George W. Bush administration and, indeed, over the past 50 years. For instance, from 2001 to 2005, per-person health-care spending rose an average of more than 7 percent per year. More important, for ordinary Americans, employer-based health insurance premiums for a family increased by 54 percent between 2001 and 2005. Conversely, from 2011 to 2015, per-person costs rose an average of just 3.4 percent per year; family insurance premiums rose only 16 percent in that same time.
Read the full Washington Post article here.
The Delayed Gratification of Obamacare
Many of the economic protections and personal benefits of health insurance, like any insurance, are long-term in nature, and will probably elude detection in public opinion over the short term. Stability for families should increase, if incrementally. Unlikely catastrophic health events should become less financially catastrophic over time, the average ability of families to handle crises should improve, and the cumulative effects of better access to care should lead to much healthier people. But those effects occur over the horizon of years, and the lives of those people that coverage can affect the most are still turbulent now.
Read the full Atlantic article here.