Obamacare, also known as the Affordable
Care Act, continues to be a prominent political topic. The Conservative party
tends be skeptical of the impact that the healthcare marketplace will have on
insurance provided in the traditional free market setting. Paul Waldman, author of Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From
Conservative Success, recently wrote an article "Some good news about Obamacare that even conservatives should love" in the Washington
Post on September 24th, 2014 highlighting this issue. Waldman is reaching out to
democrats, but also to the conservatives, arguing that the free market for
health insurance has embraced the Affordable Care Act.
Conservatives
anticipated that a government supplemented system would lack the healthy
subscribers needed to form a stable and profitable base. Without this, they
feared that all consumers would be left with higher health insurance premiums
to support a system burdened with demand. However, recent data has suggested
that this is not the case. Healthy people are
signing up for insurance and the data collected by the Department of Health and
Human Services show that the free market has embraced the Affordable Care Act.
The number of insurers is set to increase by almost by 25 percent within the
next year, suggesting that the free market and the affordable care act exist in
harmony. The evidence shows that people are continuing to enroll,
allowing for lower premiums in a competitive market place. Rival companies will
keep premiums low in an effort to stay profitable in a market controlled by
supply and demand. Data listed on table 3, page 11, from the Department of Health and
Human Services shows that the healthy age group of 18 to 34 grew faster than
any other age group.
The Affordable Health Care Act should be welcomed instead of ostracized
by conservatives because data is showing that it’s successful and should continue
to be successful.
No comments:
Post a Comment