Obama and Obamacare Are Here to Stay

After constantly reading headlines on the presidential race being “tied”, President Barack Obama nudges past Mitt Romney to claim re-election.  You have to admit that even after months of being saturated with political ad campaigns, analysis and the debates, you’ll miss these days before the election. From the Clint Eastwood speech to Sesame Street’s Big Bird, it has been a roller coaster of events!

This election had so much at stake, including the future of health care, as we know it. The United States has the highest per capita medical expenditures of any country in the world.  President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney were worlds apart on how they would fix America’s healthcare crisis.  President Obama’s health care proposal relies heavily on cutting reimbursements to Medicare providers, whether it is the amount hospitals might get for a heart bypass to how much an imaging center is reimbursed for an MRI. President Obama’s  re-election guarantees the continued implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) of 2010, also known as “Obamacare.” Under the Obama administration we can expect the expansion of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs); the increased use of comparative effectiveness research (CER), plus the implementation of the new insurance exchanges, scheduled to be up and running in 2014.

Romney has said that the Affordable Care Act, despite its name, will lead to higher-cost health insurance and will force millions of people to change their insurance plans whether they want to or not. President Obama said that health care reform addressed a real problem for Americans who worried about going bankrupt if they got sick or couldn’t get coverage due to pre-existing conditions. The president insisted that people can keep their own private insurance plans, but the new law means insurers “can’t jerk you around.”