Opinion: Obamacare controversy

Obamacare has been praised for long as America’s next step to civil peace. However, that peace has been met with the reality that it extremely limits the people in what they can afford and have from Obamacare policies.

Obamacare, Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, was enacted on 23 March, 2010 by President Barack Obama.

Admittedly the act itself has well-intentions, but to force individual Americans to purchase health insurance or face tax penalties is an affront to our individual right to choose our services. These penalties are fines that affect our tax returns and, as of 2017, can cost citizens and residents 2.5 percent of their household income or $695 per adult and $347.50 per child. This fine is directly deducted from your hard earned tax money and even when deducted you do not receive any health insurance until you purchase your own.

Another stretch on household expense is the falsehood of the affordability of Obamacare. Although low to no income households are given immense subsidies to have free or low cost health insurance this is not the same for the middle class. Average income households are diverse in what they can afford with many individuals paying far more than their previous insurance plan for Obamacare leaving them in a deeper hole. What used to cost $200 for a family of 4 is now $500.

Furthermore, President Obama on multiple occasions promised Americans since 2009 that even with Obamacare “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” proved to false. PolitiFact rated that statement as the “Lie of the Year” in December 2013 when in Fall 2013 over 4 million Americans received health insurance cancellation letters from their respective providers. This was caused by health insurance companies that were unable to keep ‘grandfather’ policies in place due to the strict laws of Obamacare. hundreds of thousands of people now pay higher rates for low quality plans they may never use.

Plus, there is no concrete estimate of how many people are enrolled in Obamacare. There are too many numbers and equations with differing results and it is quite ridiculous for anyone to say that Obamacare is growing in popularity when there’s no possible way (unless there is a universal standard to estimating the number) to determine a near enough number.

Next, businesses are extremely affected by the legislation if they employ more than 50 full time workers. Any company with 50+ full time workers must provide high quality health insurance for them. This has become a detriment for companies to hire anymore full time workers and because they are now forced to have higher quality care they have resorted to decreasing work hours placing their full time employees in part time positions or simply laying off personnel they can no longer afford to keep.

In conclusion, from my point of view this is just a terrible piece of legislation. People are losing jobs, businesses are not hiring full time employees, people are paying more for less, and forceful purchase of insurance is denying our freedom to choose.

We need to reform healthcare… again.

Next article will cover the process of either dropping or enacting TrumpCare.