The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a healthcare act that was brought into power in 2010, during President Obama’s term. The Act’s main goals focused on reforming the private area of the insurance market and expanding Medicaid to the poor working population. Considering that due to racial and social stereotypes, language barriers, and bigotry, minorities often struggle with finding adequately paying employment, ACA’s impact on their lives was largely positive. However, not every stratum of the American population has been affected by equality, and white citizens are the main beneficiaries of the Act.
For years, it has been a major struggle for Hispanics and people of color to access proper healthcare. The Affordable Care Act allowed minorities to advance in life expectancy and examination for chronic illnesses. Before ACA, the percentage of uninsured African Americans stood at approximately 20%, while all Americans were at approximately 16%. This number has been decreased for people of color to 12%, showing that measures taken to manage ethnic and racial disbalance in healthcare have been more or less successful. On the other hand, the number of uninsured general American population also decreased: it has lowered to 9.7% (Lee & Porell, 2020). In addition, the Act does not consider that minorities often cannot find employment, rendering them ineligible for the Act’s agency. Thus, the disparity remains despite the fact that the uninsurance gap has been reduced almost by fifty percent.
In conclusion, the Affordable Care Act has been effective in establishing healthcare equity with various degrees of success. People in minority groups are often unable to access good jobs, and ACA provides help to those with low income. Nonetheless, it is also true that African Americans and ethnic minorities have difficulties finding a job, so there is still a gap in the distribution of insurance protection.
Reference
Lee, H., & Porell, F. W. (2020). The effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on disparities in access to care and health status. Medical Care Research and Review, 77(5), 461–473.