With the Treasury Department delaying the employee mandate to January 2015, giving employers an extra year to ensure they make employee benefits available to their workers, it's clear that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is rife with problems. But even if it were to be implemented without incident, it would still be a bad piece of legislation, a healthcare policy analyst recently asserted.
According to Hadley Heath, senior policy analyst for the Independent Women's Forum, there have been myriad examples illustrating the fundamental deficiencies of the ACA, causing the federal government to make major adjustments. For example, a provision in the original law, requiring business owners to file 1099 forms for other businesses was repealed after it was deemed overly burdensome. In addition, the portion of the bill that dealt with long-term care coverage was eventually nixed because lawmakers who drafted the legislation admitted that it was financially destitute.
And as the ACA currently stands, Health notes, the reform law is still riddled with issues that will eventually become major problems, if they haven't already. For example, 34 states have refused to establish their own exchanges, leaving them to the federal government to set up and run. But because states that initiate their own marketplaces are eligible for subsidies, those exchanges that are left to the federal government may not be sufficiently capitalized.
Heath asserts that this wasn't a mistake, though – it was designed with the intention of encouraging states to run their own exchanges.
"It just didn't work, as many state lawmakers recognized that running an exchange was a raw deal: a costly endeavor without meaningful control," said Heath.
The public in general is largely against the ACA. In a recent Gallup poll, 52 percent of respondents stated they were opposed to the health reform law. Negative sentiment is particularly stark when taking political affiliation into account, as 89 percent of Republicans disapprove.
