Generosity in Healthcare Policy Under the Obama Administration

Abstract

The landmark United States healthcare reform law—the Affordable Care Act—provides an opportunity to study the dynamics in healthcare sector.This article posits that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) constitutes an effective public policy alternative that remedies some of the previous problems which existed in America's healthcare system. The ACA seeks to reform the private insurance market, expand Medicaid to the working poor and to change the way medical decisions are made in end-of-life decisions. The central hypothesis of this paper is that the ACA is an improved alternative to the previous policy regime on healthcare in the United States. This hypothesis is unambiguously supported by the rational resource allocation model together with a host of other heuristic approaches. Claims made in this paper also relied on findings of empirical studies, reports, and evaluative studies on the performance of the ACA since its enactment into national legislation under the Obama administration.