Checking the pulse of Obamacare
From the very beginning, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, has been beset with problems: bitter debate among lawmakers, a Supreme Court challenge, and crippling technical difficulties with sign-up site Healthcare.gov, to name a few. More recently, insurers have been pulling out of the law’s insurance exchanges, and just last week the federal government announced that the cost of some health care plans would jump next year by 25 percent. Still, some 20 million more people have health insurance thanks to the ACA, and the new law prohibits insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing health conditions. To assess the ACA landscape the Gazette spoke with Katherine Baicker, the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. GAZETTE: Do you think the Affordable Care Act has worked? Has it achieved the goals that the...