The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, was a White House initiative signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010. This landmark legislation made history due to its complicated passage in Congress and the number of compromises that resulted from strong opposition by Republican lawmakers. Even after the law was enacted, the law had its fair share of legal challenges before it could actually be put into practice. In late June 2012, the United States Supreme Court published a decision that ascertained the constitutionality of Obamacare; from that time on, the law was put into practice and its health insurance benefits were made available to the people of the United States.
Understanding Obamacare
How Obamacare Provides Health Insurance Benefits
The main goal of Obamacare is to make sure that Americans who once lacked access to health insurance due to financial reasons could finally obtain a reasonable policy. Another aim of the law is to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage when the insured need them the most. Monthly premiums are now made affordable through a series of subsidies, and the law was never intended to serve as a replacement of the existing health insurance marketplace.
Compliance with the new law means that insurance companies must now offer a certain number of essential benefits in all their policies; this is largely a strategy of prevention and health management. If an insurance company wishes to offer medical insurance policies, it must provide these essential benefits, which include: emergency care, annual physical exams, laboratory tests, pregnancy care, and contraception. Another major benefit is aimed at families who wish to keep young adults covered by their policies until the age of 26; this gives young people time to take internships and other introductory jobs that do not offer comprehensive medical benefits.
Patients who suffer from chronic illnesses can now rest assured that those lifetime limits on insurance policies that denied them coverage are now gone. Pre-existing conditions are no longer considered to be factors for discrimination, and other limits that have been removed by the Affordable Care Act include those that used to be imposed on an annual basis in accordance to spending.
Levels of Coverage Provided by Obamacare
The Affordable Care Act created four levels of health insurance coverage, which start with the Bronze Plan. At the lowest coverage level, the insured pay 40 percent out-of-pocket; on the other hand, the Platinum Plan requires a higher monthly premium payment but only asks for co-payments of 10 cents on the dollar. In general, the lower the level of coverage level, the higher the amount of the co- payments.