“The Brookings Institute is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C. …[and their] mission is to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national, and global level”(Dews, 2017). They are made up of over three-hundred experts who are a part of government and academia from all around the world “…who provide the highest quality research, policy recommendations, and analysis on a full range of public policy issues” (Dews, 2017).
Alice Rivlin, Henry Aaron, and Bill Galston are three the experts at Brookings Institute, and they all believe that repealing and replacing Obamacare would be nearly impossible for various reasons. Alice Rivlin said that Republicans are having trouble creating a replacement because “…while they ‘could agree on trashing Obamacare…they did not have a common intellectual basis for designing a replacement and they still don’t’”(Dews, 2017). Henry Aaron lists three reasons that Republicans will not be able to keep true to their promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare, which is that Obamacare has been successful and not a failure, the goals they made in discussing repeal are not possible, and the fallout from a political stance would be overwhelming. Lastly, Bill Galston says that the benefits that Medicaid has brought are helping those who voted for someone who wants to get rid of them. “The states won by Donald Trump in 2016, Galston writes, ‘disproportionately benefitted from the expansion of Medicaid that was one of the building blocks of Obamacare, and they will suffer disproportionately from Medicaid cuts’”(Dews, 2017).
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If Obamacare were repealed without a replacement, it would be disastrous for the country as a whole. Alice Rivlin, Loren Adler, and Stuart Butler summarized that on top of the millions of Americans who would lose coverage, “‘risks nearly destroying the individual market altogether if no replacement emerges’”(Dews, 2017). The hope of a replacement is not good enough, the program needs to be replaced if it is repealed. Henry Aaron and Robert Reischauer argued that “‘repeal [of the Affordable Care Act] without having an agreed upon plan for replacement in place is a recipe for calamity’”(Dews, 2017). They claim that if the Affordable Care Act is repealed but not replaced, more people would be without insurance than if the act had not been passed in the first place (Dews, 2017).
Personally, I think that the Affordable Care Act has been one of the best advancements in healthcare in recent years for America. The coverage gap between low and high-economic status is ridiculous to me. I think that it should be required for all countries to have universal healthcare because even thinking about the fact that thousands of people die every year because they cannot afford the medication, medical procedure/device, or care they need is heartbreaking. The Affordable Care Act is a step in the right direction. Millions more people are now insured due to its enactment and people who were already insured with low coverage now have a lot more variety in the coverage they receive and where they can go to receive treatment. The Affordable Care Act has its goal in the title, which is to make care more affordable. It has done that successfully for the most part, it has made care more affordable for lower economic classes and it has made prescription drugs more affordable. No program is perfect and that includes this one, it has things it needs to work on, but I think that the benefits have substantially outweighed the negative effects.
As I said previously, I think that the Affordable Care Act is an amazing piece of legislation and has helped countless people. However, it has several flaws that need to be worked on. The major issues that need to be focused on are “…offsetting the negative impacts of repealing the individual and employer mandates, loosening age rating restrictions in the individual market, and doing more to encourage states to apply the Section 1332 waivers” (Dews, 2017). Section 1332 waivers are waivers that allow states to experiment with other ways to provide their residents with healthcare coverage that delivers more or equal to the same amount of healthcare coverage that is provided by the Affordable Care Act (Tolbert and Pollitz, 2018).
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