Obama care vs Trump healthcare
| Subject: | 🏥 Health Care |
| Type: | Compare and Contrast Essay |
| Pages: | 3 |
| Word count: | 829 |
| Topics: | Affordable Care Act, Donald Trump, Health Insurance, Medicine, 👨🏽💼 Barack Obama |
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Table of Contents
There are immense benefits to having health insurance, from the simple peace of mind of knowing that personal or family financial status will not change in case of a medical emergency to the access one has to premium care when they have insurance. In the US, health insurance is a major topic and has been so in recent years following the introduction of the Obama care and the Trump health care systems (Allen, 2017). Despite the debate on which is better for Americans, Trumpcare, in a bid to correct the complaints raised in Obamacare, it ended up creating a worse system for most Americans.
What is Obamacare
To understand why Obama care is the best choice, we first have to understand what each system stands for. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), best known as the Obama care, was introduced in 2010 and was designed to mandate everyone to have healthcare insurance by enforcing it into law and lowering the premiums paid by individuals (Collier, 2017). It was implemented to ensure everyone receives uncompensated care unless they qualify for hardship exemptions. There are various advantages to it; first, it targets insurance companies and ensures that they do not deny anyone insurance despite pre-existing conditions (Miller et al., 2020). It further enforces the companies to cover basic health services such as prescription medication and preventative services. Perhaps one of the biggest advantages is the subsidies for low-income families enabling them to afford health insurance coverage (LI, & LI, 2018). The disadvantage is that despite the subsidies, the costs have not been reduced for everyone. Also, most people have lost company-sponsored coverage as a way of cost saving for the company, and then there is the introduction tax penalties recently introduced for those uninsured.
What is Trump healthcare
The American Health Care Act (ACHA) or Trumpcare is a form of revised or rather a replacement for the Obama care Act introduced in 2017. The key objective of the new plan was to promote affordability, increase insurance choices, and promote transparency (Brown, 2018). This was much more promoted by showing its unique benefits, which included priority to American patients, families, and seniors by giving them more choices, improved care, and low costs (Mahboub, 2021). Some of the advantages being offered under this plan included tax-free healthcare savings, increased available choices by allowing competition, removed surprise medical bills, lowered medicate advantages premiums by 34 percent, expanded health reimbursements, and offered association health plans (Brown, 2018). Despite the highly publicized advantages of the new system, it still had its shortcomings. These included fewer people who became insured, those with pre-existing conditions faced higher premiums, and older adults were also subjected to higher premiums, sometimes up to three times what they would normally pay.
How different are they from each other?
All these factors make it easier to see how the two are different, even though they were designed to help all Americans. First, Trumpcare was designed to eliminate the individual mandate for everyone to take up insurance (Mahboub, 2021). However, it was poorly executed because, despite the complaints about forcing everyone to be insured, the long terms effects were favorable. There is also the fact that the Obama care mandated insurers to offer certain benefits such as preventative care, something that Trumpcare removed, and the side effects were seen during the recent Covid-19 pandemic (Miller et al., 2020). While it sounds advantageous for state authorities to manage Medicaid, it is just one other area that Trumpcare went wrong compared to Obama care.
Which is better?
Both healthcare Acts were designed to help Americans access care; however, the complexities and nature of each made them have various disadvantages. Considering that over 2.3 million Americans have lost coverage since the proposal of Trumpcare, it means there is something wrong with the system (Miller et al., 2020). Obamacare indeed had its shortcomings, but on average, it was meant to help all Americans especially the minority and those unable to afford quality care. Trumpcare came with a lot of considerations for Americans, such as covered benefits and risk pools (Allen, 2017). However, its mandate to remove most of the provisions that were set in the affordable care Act, such as the individual mandate, the employer mandate, Medicaid expansion, and federal government control, set it for a disaster finish. There is still hope for healthcare insurance, but a lot needs to be changed with the citizens in mind rather than political reasons.
Conclusion
Healthcare insurance for all is a win; however, we all cannot afford insurance, and that is why the government is there to help set policies that make it easy for all citizens to access and use insurance. It should also be noted that creating policies and enforcing health care law is not a one-off fix, rather, we should be able to learn and correct mistakes or create improvements from existing systems. Instead of getting rid of the policies set in the Obamacare system, the Trumpcare system would have greatly benefited from improving rather than getting rid of what was set in the ACA.
- Allen, J. I. (2017). From Obamacare to Trumpcare: Implications for Gastroenterologists. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 15(6), 804-808.
- Brown, D. J. (2018). Obamacare v. Trumpcare: Challenging the Partisan Politics Sabotaging US Healthcare Reform. U. La Verne L. Rev., 40, 31.
- Collier, R. (2017). Why trumpcare failed. CMAJ, 189(17), E645-E646.
- LI, J., & LI, Z. (2018). From Obamacare to Trumpcare: Implication of American Medical Reform for China. Chinese Health Economics, 94-96.
- Mahboub, O. (2021). Adoption versus Replacement:“Obamacare” at Crossroads. ALTRALANG Journal, 3(03), 83-106.
- Miller, I. F., Becker, A. D., Grenfell, B. T., & Metcalf, C. J. E. (2020). Disease and healthcare burden of COVID-19 in the United States. Nature Medicine, 26(8), 1212-1217.
Offered for reference purposes only.