The greatest and most immediate health care threat facing the nation is the possibility of a chief executive and a GOP Congressional majority willing to turn their backs on all those millions of Obamacare beneficiaries - including all those average Americans who now take for granted their ability to buy health insurance despite a pre-existing condition or to keep dependents on a family policy until the age of 26, all made possible by the unfairly maligned health care law.A moment of truth approaches for President Barack Obama’s signature health care reforms with Saturday’s self-imposed deadline to get the website to work properly for most users. Bernie Sanders has promoted through a single-payer model - is a conversation for another day. Whether the country is ready to embrace an even greater expansion of health insurance access - such as Sen. And one of the first groups to suffer will be children, as studies have shown one of the more striking effects of the ACA has been to get more low-income kids signed up for health insurance coverage under Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Plan or CHIP (with more than 90 percent of eligible children now enrolled). It's simply not a serious strategy to address a complex and chronic problem.

The net effect is that millions will lose coverage and those who retain it are destined to pay considerably more.Ĭlearly, what ails the Trump health care plan is the same problem that ails the Republican majority in Congress - the call to 'repeal and replace' Obamacare is really a call to repeal and then allow millions of Americans to suffer the consequences. Meanwhile, scrapping the mandate would inevitably increase costs as providers lose sales volume. The rest is fairly marginal - such as health care savings accounts that do little for people who can't afford to put money in them or allowing insurers to more easily compete across state lines. Trump has offered to date would mean no more Obamacare-related taxes and no more Obamacare-related subsidies and no more insurance mandate. But they are reasons to shore up the ACA model, not to scrap it. The outlook for a major premium increase - for example, an anticipated 8 percent in California next year - and a drop of providers from the marketplace (most recently by UnitedHealthCare which provides insurance to about 1 million health exchange patrons) do not bode well. Where has the ACA fallen short? Clearly, it's not doing enough to cap insurance costs, even though insurance rates have risen less precipitously in recent years than they did before Obamacare took effect. The result has been a steady shrinking of the number of uninsured each year since Obamacare went into effect, particularly in the states that operated their own exchanges and chose to expand Medicaid coverage for the working poor. Lest anyone forget, the Affordable Care Act made it possible for people with pre-existing conditions to buy insurance without penalty and for those earning 133 percent of the federal poverty level to qualify for Medicaid (at least in those states that welcomed the federally-subsidized Medicaid expansion). Not only does a lack of insurance worsen and shorten lives, it puts millions of working families at risk of financial ruin - as anyone who has suffered a major illness while not having the benefit of insurance can attest. Whatever faults Obamacare may have - and it's been no panacea for the shortcomings of health care in this country - even its harshest critics must recognize those 16 million to 17 million people (depending on whose estimates one uses) who have received a literal lifeline from health care reform.

Obamacare success story