Custom essays on Healthcare Reform in the United States

Democrats argue that the reform would make health care more affordable and limit corporate income of the medical insurance companies. It will cost 940 billion dollars for 10 years. But at the same time it will help to reduce the budget deficit by 138 billion, due to the struggle with extra costs, fraud and abuse. The reform also implies an increase in welfare benefits to the richest Americans in the pension program, as well as an increase in fees from the pharmaceutical industry and manufacturers of medical equipment (Grillo-López, “Challenges and opportunities” 295-296).
Simultaneously, the health care reform includes the additional tax for wealthy Americans at the rate of 5,4%, for those, whose incomes are slightly lower than 350 thousand dollars a year(McWilliams 489-91). According to the authors of the draft, additional taxation would allow financing the reform of the health sector, which is aimed at providing health insurance for all the Americans and reducing the cost of treatment.
The slogan of the Democrats supporting the reform is “Healthcare is a right, not a privilege”. Thus, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi stated that after a year of debate, having listened to the needs of millions of Americans, they came to this historic decision. Now they have the opportunity to complete a great deal for the society and make health insurance available for all Americans.
Critics of the reform, mainly Republicans, argue that it would make the health sector – which makes about one sixth of the U.S. economy – more similar to the one that exists in Western Europe. In their view it will be based, as they claim, on “socialist” principles (Grillo-López, “Challenges and opportunities” 295-296).
In addition, the implementation of the project means that, in conjunction with the introduction of the tax, the highest tax threshold in the U.S. will grow to 45%. Currently, the wealthiest Americans pay only 23% tax, while their contributions to the gross income increased over the past 20 years, from 11 to 22% (Grillo-López, “Why it will not work” 121-122). Republicans also speak out against the reform as it cuts growing government payments to doctors. They believe that such innovations will lead to the introduction of national health insurance system. It will only increase the budget expenditures and deprive Americans of the opportunity to choose their own doctors (Grillo-López, “Challenges and opportunities” 295-296).
The restructuring includes a number of innovations that could impress many voters, but the trouble is that most of them will be implemented only in 2014, while the bad news comes almost immediately. For example, according to the law, U.S. corporations are required to report the Federal Commission on Securities and Exchange Commission about future losses, as soon as they learn about them themselves. So as soon as the Reform Act was signed by the President, corporations, one after another, started to declare what this reform would cost them (Grillo-López, “Why it will not work” 121-122).
The point is that the reform cancels tax remissions, the companies were earlier provided with for paying for expensive drugs of their retirees, and thus didn’t impose this burden on the state. The telephone company Verizon announced that it will lose 970 million dollars on the restructuring. Its competitors AT&T informed the commission that their losses reach one billion dollars. A manufacturer of agricultural equipment John Deere reform state that the reform will cost the company 150 million dollars.
According to the head of CNN social service Keating Holland, some Americans said they would not approve the new law only because they believe that the applied measures are not effective enough. A quarter of respondents opposed the reform and one in three Americans support only some of its points, while some of them do not want to do any changes to the health system. According to the poll, 42% of Americans support Obama’s law, while 15% of them approve the actions of the head of the state, but believe that changes will not fundamentally change the healthcare system. In total, the study involved more than 1 thousand people interviewed by CNN employees during four days.
According to recent polls of CBS broadcaster, the reform is approved by only 32% of Americans, while 53% refer to it negatively (Spigelman 46-49). None of the fateful reforms of the past decades, like the adoption of the law on pensions for elderly people, or the introduction of health service programs for the elderly, was so unpopular among people from its very beginning.
Unlike previous reforms of this scale this one was adopted with only one faction of the Congress, and not even by all its members: three dozen Democrats voted against the health restructuring along with the rest of the Republican faction. It gives the opponents of the reform hope to succeed where previous critics of crucial reforms failed trying unsuccessfully to get them cancelled.
In two weeks that passed since that day when the democratic part of the U.S. House of Representatives approved a radical restructuring of American health care, the number of opponents of this reform became even greater. Supporters of the reform were elated with the poll of the newspaper USA Today on 22 March, that is, the very next day after the vote. 49% of respondents called the outcome of the vote a positive development, and 40% voted against.
But Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, remarks that polls conducted immediately after an event are often momentary. According to him, during this survey the media almost in one voice sang of the triumph of health care reform, the objections of Republicans were simply drowned in the chorus.
A few days later the poll of the newspaper made an entirely different result: 47% of the respondents said that the reform is a good thing, while 50% responded negatively on the reform. Furthermore: 53% described the tactics used by the Democrats to push this initiative through Congress as abuse. 40% were satisfied with this tactic. According to the polls, the Americans, the vast majority of whom have health insurance and is quite happy with it, were not so much worried about the relatively small number of uninsured, as with the high cost of national medicine (McWilliams 453-55). Advocating for the restructuring, Democrats asserted that it would make healthcare cheaper. But according to the same survey, 50% of Americans against only 21% believe that because of the reform the treatment will cost them even more (Spigelman 48).