It can be found all over the media, everybody seems to be discussing it and opinions seldom differed so widely about it: The American health care reform. When I started my project I was well informed about the up-to-dateness of this topic and had a personal opinion, but actually I must admit that I knew very little about the concrete contents of the amendment. So it is high time I sorted this out:
The health care reform in the United States, for which Barack Obama became a leading figure, was signed in 2010 and consists of two main parts: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (short PPACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. Well, these are nice titles, but what is behind them?
Today, I will start with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was signed by President Barack Obama in March, 2010. As most people are not keen on working through 974 pages of officialese, summaries of it are very popular. You can have them in any variation on the web: short ones, shorter ones and those aiming at the length of the original, quality ones and rather arbitrary interpretations, full texts or in note form…
What I am trying to do now is to offer a very brief recapitulation of the PPACA within not more than 10 lines. That should definitely be short enough to stay away of any limit of endurance:
Within the next years the government claims that it creates a programme similar to Medicare/Medicaid for people that are not covered by one of those or another plan yet, establishes a mix of private and governmental run health insurances called “National Health Insurance Exchange” creating competition within insurance companies, improves the quality and affordability of health care, enables to keep one’s insurance when changing employer, reduces or at least contains the costs of the health care system in general, removes the monopoly of drug companies, prohibits the denial of children with pre-existing conditions and ensures the expansion of preventive programmes.
I thank Robert Laszewski for his detailed analysis of the act to which I refer as a source. Those who appreciate critical report should really take a look at it.
If even this is not enough information, why not take your time and examine the full official version available as a PDF document (or use the index to find the sections most relevant to you).
Some of the main aspects and additional information are also presented in this video. But as it is published by the government itself it is of course extraordinarily positive:
So the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 will be added soon...
