A Quote by Barack Obama
You look at something like health care, the Affordable Care Act. And for all the controversy, we now have 20 million people who have health insurance who didn't have it. It's actually proven to be more effective, cheaper than even advocates like me expected.
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Say good-bye to the Affordable Care Act. That means 20 million people who lose their health insurance, just like that.
The rise in health care costs since Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act was passed, have been at their lowest rate in 50 years. Those savings have extended the Medicare trust fund by 11 years. So we've got a baseline of facts.So it is true theoretically that all that progress can be undone, and suddenly 20 million people or more don't have health insurance.
President Obama famously promised that the Affordable Care Act would not only slow the growth in health care costs, but would also reverse these trends, making the average health insurance plan cheaper. That isn't happening.
We have health insurance companies playing a major role in the provision of healthcare, both to the employed whose employers provide health insurance, and to those who are working but on their own are not able to afford it and their employers either don't provide it, or don't provide it at an affordable price. We are still struggling. We've made a lot of progress. Ten million Americans now have insurance who didn't have it before the Affordable Care Act, and that is a great step forward.
High-quality health care is not available to millions of Americans who don't have health insurance, or whose substandard plans provide minimum coverage. That's why the Affordable Care Act is so important. It provides quality health insurance to both the uninsured and underinsured.
Right at the heart of the Affordable Care Act is the ban on insurance companies discriminating against people with a pre-existing condition. And this part of the Affordable Care Act makes sure that health care is not just for the healthy and wealthy.
Since the Affordable Care Act allows individuals to buy affordable health care coverage on their own, women no longer have to remain in a job just for the health insurance - they can feel free to start their own business or care for a child or elderly parent.
What sensible people have got to do is not simply repeal the Affordable Care Act without any alternative, but you've got to sit down and say it's OK, what are the problems. How do we address it? How do we move to universal health care? How do we lower prescription drug costs? How do we make sure that people don't have outrageous deductibles? You just don't throw 20 million people off of health insurance. You don't privatize Medicare.
The Affordable Care Act is a huge problem. [Repealing the ACA is] going to have huge implications. We have millennials that live in Boston that are on their parents' health insurance. The businesses have hired them and have been able to hire more people because they have been able to be on their own health insurance. We have seniors in our city who have preexisting conditions, or something called a "donut hole," which is a prescription drug [gap] in Medicare. Whatever changes they make could have detrimental effects on people's health care, but also on the economy.
With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, more people will have insurance coverage and, in principle, be eligible for more care.
The result was, of course, that today, tragically, more than 40 million Americans don't have health insurance, and for many, not having health insurance means they don't have access to good health care.
We are unique among advanced countries that we don't have universal health care. My hope was that I was able to get a hundred percent of people health care while I was president. We didn't quite achieve that, but we were able to get 20 million people health care who didn't have it before. And obviously some of the progress we made is now imperiled because there's still a significant debate taking place in the United States. For those 20 million people, their lives have been better.
I believe we can incentivize more affordable health care in general by better regulating insurance and creating meaningful competition for health care services.
Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable.
Creative new health strategies like micro-insurance for poor people or Kangaroo care for pre-term babies are transforming health outcomes in even the most low-resource settings. Dedication and innovation are transforming health care worldwide.
The Affordable Care Act has clearly, as Secretary Clinton made the point, done a lot of good things, but, what it has not done is dealt with the fact we have 29 million people today who have zero health insurance, we have even more who are underinsured with large deductibles and copayments and prescription drug prices are off the wall.
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