HEALTH CARE BILL

President Obama's Health Care Bill

President Obama's Health Care Bill

The U.S. president, Barack Obama, today signed the landmark health reform law, which will extend coverage to 30 million Americans who lacked it. "The law I sign today will launch reforms that generations of this country have fought for years," the president said at a ceremony in which legislators were present to promote the reform and ordinary citizens who will benefit from the measure. A smiling Obama as perhaps never since the day of his inauguration he insisted that "today, after nearly a century of evidence, now after more than a year of debate, today after they have counted all the votes, the health system reform becomes law in the United States (Lubotsky, Mazumder, Seeskin, 2010).

In order not to overshadow the event, the White House canceled a ceremony to launch its new drug plan, which was to attend Vice President Joseph Biden, originally scheduled for today. In addition, Obama did not continue throughout the day other public events, as even his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will be closed. The House had approved the measure, valued at 938,000 million dollars, last Sunday by 219 votes to 212, after a long negotiation process. The Senate had already done in December. The Senate is scheduled to begin to see this week a bill that the House also approved on Sunday, including a number of changes to the rule promulgated today. Obama plans to travel to Iowa City on Thursday to deliver a speech in which he defended the reform, very unpopular among the U.S. public sector, what other things he fears the impact it will have on the deficit. The reform, expanding coverage to 32 million Americans by 2019, aims to reduce health care costs, and imposes more requirements on insurers.

Impact on Economy

Health care costs have been a major concern of politicians and the general public for the past few decades. As health care costs have risen over the years, they have become a larger percentage of the U.S. economy's gross domestic product (GDP). As a result, last year, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, Senate, and White House developed, passed the bill, and President Obama signed into law the America's Affordable Health Choices Act (AAHCA) of 2009 (Hetter, 2009). This bill is designed, in simple terms, according to the writers, to provide health care insurance to all Americans through an insurance exchange or by the government.

It was “designed” to provide insurance to the currently uninsured, to those who have preexisting conditions that previously excluded them from receiving coverage, and to do it in a manner that, according to the politicians, would actually reduce the budget. Many of these things are noble actions but in my world, one plus one always equals two. Taking into account that people without insurance are able to access care when needed under the current system but do so in the most expensive way, that is, through emergency departments, there is some room to cut costs in ...