Mandatory Health Insurance: The Affordable Care Act (Research Paper Sample)

Mandatory Health Insurance: Affordable Care Act
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The affordable care act is a healthcare law that was approved by the American Senate on 24th December 2009. This law was signed and enacted on 23rd March 2010. It addresses health security and healthcare coverage in America. In particular, this legislation requires each to have a health insurance beginning in 2014 or face a tax penalty. The legislation has two distinct parts. The first part is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act while the second part is the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act 2010 (Medicaid.gov, 2014). However, only the first part is analysed in this essay.
The main focus of this legislation is to ensure high quality and affordable health care as well as improving health care coverage in America. To achieve this, the Affordable Care Act puts in place comprehensive reforms in health insurance. These reforms aim at expanding health care coverage, holding health insurance companies accountable, lowering the cost of health services and enhancing the quality of healthcare for all Americans. More importantly, this law seeks to expand medical coverage to millions of low-income earners and children who may not have access to quality health care services (Medicaid.gov, 2014).
There are various provisions under this legislation including eligibility, financing, benefits, program transparency and integrity and children’s health insurance. The eligibility provision focuses on filling the gap in health care coverage for the poorest individuals by creating a minimum income eligibility level. Besides, the law states that all adults from 26 years of age, and above are eligible for mandatory health insurance. Moreover, the legislation requires a health plan to provide dependent coverage for all children. The financing provision requires all eligible adults to purchase an insurance cover beginning in 2014. Besides, the provision states that all newly eligible adults’ health insurance will be fully funded for three years by the federal government. This funding will phase down to 90% by the year 2020. All the provisions described under this law are meant to offer policy guidance and emphasise the objectives of the Affordable Care Act (Congress.gov, 2014).
Although it can be argued that the Affordable Care Act forced many Americans to purchase health insurance, statistics show that over 80% of Americans already had health insurance before the law was enacted. Moreover, the legislation accepts insurance coverage from the majority of the insurance companies in America. Hence, Americans who had health insurance before this legislation satisfy its requirement. Sources of insurance coverage that are acceptable according to this law include Medicare, employer-provided insurance, TRICARE, Medicaid and any other privately purchased insurance from an insurance company that is at least at the Bronze level (Congress.gov, 2014).
The legislation, however, exempts certain types of individuals from the mandatory purchase of health insurance. Some of the individuals exempted from this mandate are undocumented immigrants, members of an Indian tribe and those whose religion is against health insuran...