Why is Healthcare in America in Turmoil?
Robert DeHerrera
Ashford University

On March 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Obama, this law would change the landscape of healthcare in America. The primary focus for the Affordable Care Act was to bring millions of Americans affordable healthcare insurance that previously due to different variables could not get health insurance. Now, five years have passed and the current healthcare system is in turmoil due to rising costs of insurance and care, political legal battles and the possibility of transforming health insurance from state to national. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to make insurance affordable …show more content…

These tax credits are designed to help lower and middle class afford their monthly health insurance premiums. Rand Corporation commissioned an economic study of the impact of dissolving the tax credit to consumers and how it would affect the marketplace. The study concluded that with lower participation and thus a more imbalanced risk pool, the underlying premiums for people buying coverage on their own would go up by an average of 43 percent ((Logiurato, 2014). Their study was based on removing subsidies from all states, but the effect of a Court ruling would be similar. “If subsidies are eliminated entirely, our research predicts substantial disruption in the individual health insurance market,” says Christiane Eibner, senior economist at RAND ((Logiurato, 2014). Earlier in this paper, I stated that key issue to ACA was the government inability to define affordability. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiff, consumers in Mississippi, a low income state (heavily federally subsidized payer mix), has the potential to have their monthly premium go from $23 to $438, that would be an increase of 1800 percent. The smallest increase would be in Arizona, where the average monthly premiums would go from $113 to $272, an increase of 141 percent. The average increase in monthly premiums, across all states, would be from $82 to $346. That would be 322 percent hike (Ollove, 2014). This would leave millions of Americans the inability to