Affordable Care Act Argumentative Analysis

The current issue that the government will have to face is what to do with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) given the recent presidential election outcome. The answer is not simple regarding whether the ACA should be replaced or repealed. The new president and congress will also have to focus on the costs of health care, driven by new drugs and treatments, an aging population, and how to preserve the Medicare program, whose current funding cannot be forever sustained. The ACA created subsidies and increased federal spending for healthcare for the purchase of health insurance and Medicaid expansion. At the same time, it reduced spending for Medicare and introduced reforms likely to make health care delivery more efficient (Rivlin & Reischauer,
Also, the government website Healthcare.gov was inundated with technical problems after its initiation on October 1, 2013.The mandated insurance from companies was deferred until 2015. Then, Obama announced that insurance companies were allowed to keep customers on their existing plans without changes. Many were angered at Obama’s ‘broken promise’. Then, companies began paying for their employees health insurance by cutting down their workforce (under the 50 limit), leaving many without jobs, and therefore, having no means to pay for insurance. Congress budgets in 2014 predicted that Obamacare would cut the US workforce by around 2.3 million workers by 2021 (Budgetary and Economic Effects of Repealing the Affordable Care Act, 2015). Obamacare has also been considered an intrusion into private lives, which launched a legal challenge. This effort was blocked when the Supreme Court declared the law constitutional. The controlling Republicans in the House of Representatives have also been working to have the law repealed. Obamacare has been criticized for being overly-complicated with its many types of insurance policies – bronze, silver, gold and platinum, plus, the co-pays, deductibles and co-insurance