In a recent rally before an audience at Washington University in St. Louis, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addressed the issues regarding the present administration's healthcare act. "I'm going to fix it. I want very much to save what works and what is good about the ACA. But we've got to get costs down," she said.
Admitting that Obamacare is broken is a step in the right direction, as insurers like Aetna, Inc. and UnitedHealth Group Inc. continue to back out of the law's markets, plunging 1.4 million Americans in 32 states to limited options and possibly, pricier premiums, according to Bloomberg.
Although the Obama administration claims that the healthcare costs aren't as expensive as they should be since the law was ratified, recent developments project a dip in future Obamacare enrollees, a sign that perhaps, the mandated economy won't be able to support the need for quality healthcare at lowered prices.
With the product being more expensive and less valuable, Obamacare is becoming a victim to its own lofty ambition, trying to institute universal healthcare in a capitalist system where competitiveness is king, according to CNBC News. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, a legitimate icon of capitalistic endeavor, is looking into capitalizing on the ACAs faults and is looking to implement an open market when it comes to healthcare.
"When we get rid of those lines, you have competition and we'll be able to keep pre-existing conditions and help people that...don't have money because we are going to have people protected," Trump said. Trump is looking into allowing insurers to sell their policies across state lines, blowing the market wide open as a way to cultivate perfect competition.
However, the question of Obamacare being broken hasn't been fully answered. For the system to function properly, a certain number of enrollees must be in the framework, along with insurers who initially welcomed the influx of new markets.
What will 'fix' the system is mainly buying into the idea of universal healthcare once more, which proved to be problematic when Obamacare was implemented in the first place. However, rebranding isn't as easy as it seems. In a capitalist society, repackaging a broken product may work for a time, but eventually, the flaws will continue to emerge.
If Clinton is looking to get what works with the ACA, that's all well and good, but she has to fix the problems that plague the system. She has to make the insurers accountable, and the enrollees to stay with their health plans, since loopholes in the system seem to allow both sides to take advantage of each other.
That's a tall order, and considering that the law is consistently mired in legislation, with outside factors chiming in, winning the presidency is the just the least of her problems. Mrs. Clinton is currently on the defensive regarding Obamacare, as her husband, Bill Clinton, recently bashed the system, calling it "crazy", and that bargaining power with insurance companies is lost, due to the unavailability of subsidies for certain markets.
