NEW YORK TIMES: …The impact of the law appears most clearly in the shrinking number of uninsured Americans. In 2014, the number of people without health insurance coverage fell to 36 million from 44.8 million in 2013, a decline of nearly 20 percent, according to data released this week by the National Center for Health Statistics…
The law has also, by many accounts, contributed to a significant slowdown in the growth of national health spending and the cost of Medicare, a pacesetter whose influence extends far beyond its 55 million beneficiaries. No one can say for sure whether the trend will continue, or how much of it is attributable to the health care law.
And industry executives said the law had fostered a revolution in the delivery of health care, encouraging hospitals large and small to increase the coordination of care and the use of electronic medical records while minimizing the readmission of patients who have been discharged. Doctors and hospitals have accepted that they will be rewarded or penalized for the quality of care they provide: their ability to keep people healthy. Medicare and private insurers have adopted a dizzying array of “quality metrics.”… (more)
EDITOR: This is a thorough treatment of the pros and cons of Affordable Care Act, a/k/a “Obamacare.” It deserves thorough reading.
If the two parties will work together, as they recently did with the Pacific Trade Pact authority, there are improvements to the law that will better serve the public.
At the time of enactment, the freak election of a Republican who opposed enactment to replace the deceased Senator Ted Kennedy, who so favored reform, made it necessary for the Senate to accept in total the House version without expected modifications and refinements that otherwise would have taken place in committee.
