Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about ObamaCare. Is it useful? Will it increase my tax? Let’s delve into ObamaCare to understand more.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), colloquially called the ‘ObamaCare is a healthcare law in the USA passed by their President, Barrack Obama in 2014. ObamaCare aims to provide locals with reasonable medical insurance and raise the quality of health insurance in the USA. It also regulates the
insurance companies in the country just like IRDAI in India.
To understand ObamaCare in detail lets breeze through its advantages and disadvantages:
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
Lakhs of uninsured Americans will get insurance along with free preventive health care | Additional tax to be paid by high-earning population and the health insurance industry to collect the money for insuring others. |
| Children’s health insurance program(CHIP) has been extended to cover up to 90 lakh kids | The finances for CHIP have been taken from the State fund. |
| Government have set-up Health Insurance marketplace to provide free or cheap healthcare insurance to more than half Americans. | All the individuals who can afford healthcare insurance should compulsorily buy it, provide an exception or pay a penalty. All of this leads to complications while filing taxes. |
| The numbers of private coverage options have increased exponentially and all the private insurance companies have to compulsorily offer the basic minimum coverage. | As the number of options has increased buying insurance has become extremely cumbersome and complicated. More often than not people end up underinsuring or over-insuring. |
| The companies in the Insurance sector can’t reject coverage for pre-existing conditions or increase the annual premium during the insurance tenure. | In order to ensure people don’t buy insurance only when they need it, the insurance companies have increased the overall cost of the policies. |
That was ObamaCare, but the question remains unanswered. Does India need a ModiCare? Considering the mammoth population, it seems a distant dream for India to introduce a universal healthcare insurance program. However, several pharmaceutical companies have already submitted a plan to the prime minister to subsidize
health insurance in India.
