What is Obamacare? (not “the ACA”)

What is Obamacare? (not “the ACA”) March 1, 2017

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADoctor_examines_patient_(1).jpg; By Unknown photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Just a small ah-ha moment here during lunch break.

How often have you heard the following?

People who want to repeal Obamacare don’t realize all the great things it includes:  the expansion of Medicaid, the elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions and lifetime maximums, the requirement that adults up to age 25 can remain dependents on a health plan, and so on.  None of these things can be taken away without causing a great deal of uproar, and, besides, they’re fools, and the fact that they don’t realize that Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing means that they don’t have anything of value to contribute to the discussion.

But there is no “official” definition of Obamacare, and it seems to me that, in practice, Obamacare is not the same thing as the ACA.  In common usage, Obamacare refers specifically to the purchase of health insurance on a state or federal exchange, and the types of plans available on those exchanges — high deductibles, narrow networks, repeated premium increases, and the decreasing selection of providers, as more and more insurers withdraw from one market or another, and the so-called “co-ops” that were intended to offer more choices, have failed.   More expansively, Obamacare includes the so-called “three-legged stool” of mandates and premium supports meant to make the elimination of pre-existing condition restrictions feasible.

All these other provisions of the ACA, that expanded existing government programs and increased government regulation for private health insurance?  Not Obamacare.  Like Medicare, Obamacare is a specific program — the exchanges, and the plans available on them — not a nickname for an extremely broad piece of legislation.

Which further means that you can repeal “Obamacare” without repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Yes, no one says this.  But if you think about the way the words are actually being used, that’s what, in the end, people actually mean.

 

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADoctor_examines_patient_(1).jpg; By Unknown photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


Browse Our Archives