D’Amore-McKim Professor Timothy Hoff, a health policy and healthcare systems expert, recently discussed the precarious situation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) within the current healthcare landscape.
Despite the fact that many aspects of the ACA (less-formally but popularly referred to as Obamacare) that have shaped American healthcare for the better—namely, how “2.5 million people under 26 took advantage of being able to stay on their parents’ insurance” and the culture that reinforces the value of having health insurance—Hoff has little faith that the U.S. Senate will “come together all of a sudden and craft a replacement bill that will get the support of 50 senators.”
Hoff references a recent Kaiser Family Foundation analysis and Washington Post report, which illuminate how “insurance exchanges are actually getting healthier,” as a result of the ACA in most parts of the United States. Hoff is quick to point out that many rural communities suffer from a dearth of plans and unreasonably high prices.
Trump could push the ACA toward the brink by “directing the IRS and other federal agencies to cease enforcing the individual health insurance mandate created under Obamacare.” Hoff explains. “That would mean healthier people could jump out of the market, leaving sicker people in there and that would destabilize insurance exchanges.”
Hoff also believes that many of the ACA’s flaws result from its limitations on “access-to-care” and the fact that it still operates via the for-profit health industry. Hoff concludes, “We need to increase the number of physicians and find new ways to deliver care to more people at a lower cost.”