Since the beginning of his presidentship in the United States, Donald Trump has made a variety of decisions directly linked to healthcare reform and impacting the situation with health insurance in the country. Trump’s contributions to changes in the healthcare system are aimed at revoking some provisions of the Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare. Although the current president has not removed Obamacare yet, some changes such as the status of the individual mandate, Medicaid funding, and Health Savings accounts (HSA) have been implemented.
Donald Trump and his supporters make efforts to remove the most controversial provisions of the act and provide different states and individual healthcare consumers with more flexible services. One of such provisions is presented by the existence of the individual mandate, which involves penalizing people who can afford insurance but fail to do it for some reason (Rice, Unruh, van Ginneken, Rosenau, & Barnes, 2018). The decision to repeal the mandate helped Trump to achieve goals related both to his voters’ expectations and the optimization of federal healthcare spending.
Also, Trump’s contributions to the healthcare system are strictly related to Medicaid services and the costs of insurance plans, but he has not managed to fulfill all of his goals yet. For instance, his campaign promises included the discontinuation of federal support for the provision of Medicaid services maintained during the presidentship of Obama (Rice et al., 2018). Nowadays, Medicaid programs still exist, “but premiums in insurance exchanges rose considerably in 2018” (Rice et al., 2018, p. 699).
Another difference between Obama’s and Trump’s approaches to healthcare management refers to HSAs. In Obamacare, insurance plans are different in terms of their compatibility with HSAs, and the Trump administration intends to increase citizens’ access to HSAs that have many tax-related advantages (Butler, 2017). The option to use HSAs demonstrates cost-effectiveness in terms of individual healthcare expenses, which explains the positive perceptions of the initiative by many citizens.
References
Butler, S. M. (2017). Repeal and replace Obamacare: What could it mean? JAMA, 317(3), 244-245.
Rice, T., Unruh, L. Y., van Ginneken, E., Rosenau, P., & Barnes, A. J. (2018). Universal coverage reforms in the USA: From Obamacare through Trump. Health Policy, 122(7), 698-702.