Obama Care

The Affordable Healthcare Act
It's hard to completely understand how this change will impact us each specifically. The Obama campagin has a tool on their website where you can put in specific factors about the health care you have now and it will generate a read out of how your care will change.  Linked here

The Pros include: (taken from Slate, the Wall Street Journal and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney's campaign websites)

• An increase in benefits for the uninsured
• Senior citizes will gain acess to billions of dollars in prescription benefits
• Everyone withinsurance will get free preventive serices
• It will increase coverage for those with a pre-existing condition
• Working families are protected from losing their health care or being forced into bankruptcy when a family member gets sick or is in an accident
• adult children can stay on their parent's health plan until the age of 26
• Mammograms, pap smears and immunixations will be covered without a co-pay including breastfeeding support, contraception, HPV testing, and domestic volence screenings
• Insurance companies are now required to justify rate hikes, and consumers have the ability to appeal to an independent third party when insurance companies refuse to cover services or care
• Starting in 2014, all Americans will have access to affordable health insurance no matter their circumstances—whether they change jobs, lose their job, decide to start a business, or retire early
• For patients, there will be fewer cash payments and lower fees.
• States can opt out of the act
• The law is expected to reduce the deficit by $127 billion from 2012 to 2021.

The Cons

• The act forces an insurer to sell a policy to someone who is already sick, which severely limits the insurer's right to charge that person a higher premium
• The bill, itself more than 2,400 pages long, relies on a dense web of regulations, fees, subsidies, excise taxes, exchanges, and rule-setting boards to give the federal government extraordinary control over every corner of the health care system
• States can opt out of certain sections of the act
• It you don't purchase health insurance you are responsible for a tax
• Flexible Spending Accounts will shrink to a maximum of $2,500
• You will only be able to deduct a medical expense from your taxes if it exceeds 10% of your gross income
• The costs are unknown

The unknowns:

• It is not known exactly how much this act will cost.  Speculation on both sides report a drastic increase in governement spending while democrats boast a reduction in spending and the overal deficit.  It remains unknown.
• The effect of “comparative effectiveness” practice guidelines on individual practioners. This is a part of the act that is aimed at improving quality while reducing costs. Republicans argue that it will be a way to manipulate provider freedom. This is explained in more detail in this NYT article. Click here