Repealing of the Individual Mandate
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The individual mandate in the affordable care act was scraped off. It was no longer mandatory for citizens to have health coverage; this also means eliminating the penalty for not having health insurance (Jost, 2017). This was an approach by the republican party in 2017 to help make health care less of a forced option and more of a citizen-centered service. Former President Donald Trump described the mandate as expensive and unpopular. It was unfair to low-income individuals and offered limited and substandard services to those in need of quality care.
The project was costly to establish and expensive to run, without a decent quality of service. This healthcare plan was also not well inclusive of all individuals within the United States, making its practicality questionable. The Act catered for older adults over sixty-five years of age, young disabled individuals, and low-income earners through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. This is positive as low-income earners often defaulted in paying for the premiums, thus receiving much harder to bear penalties (Williams, 2020).
The idea of repealing this provision of the healthcare act opened the entire Act to criticism and ridicule, with various sections facing a possible change. It also led to the increase in price for other existing insurance plans. With the individual mandate removed, healthy individuals would opt not to subscribe to insurance premiums; hence, a lesser client base would be experienced; therefore, requiring increased prices to meet the expected margins. Anticipating the low numbers to be brought about by this change, insurance companies increased the cost of health insurance plans by about 32% from 2018 (Williams, 2020).
References
Jost, T. (2017). The tax bill and the individual mandate: what happened, and what does it mean?. Health Affairs.
Williams, R. A. (2020). Healthcare Reform Law (Obamacare): Update on “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” and the Persistence of Polarization on Repeal and Replace. In Blacks in Medicine (pp. 91-95). Springer, Cham.