The news lately is primarily focused, and rightly so, on the coronavirus pandemic. But another thing that happened last week was the 10-year anniversary of Obamacare. The law still has an enormous impact, including on how people are able to access — or not access — medical care during a crisis. What the U.S. still needs to do to improve health care has been a subject of much debate during the Democratic presidential primary, and it’s sure to be a topic in the general election as well. Possibly lost in the shuffle are the real ways the law made the system better.
To look at how the law has helped or failed people in its decade of existence, HuffPost reporter Jeffrey Young went back to subjects of previous stories over the years to see how they're doing now. We talked about why he picked this way to look at the law and what he learned from it.
Your piece returns to people who have been previously covered in Obamacare stories and looks at how they're doing now. How did you come up with this idea?
Stories about big, complicated things like the Affordable Care Act usually are stronger and more compelling when we can show how they affect individual people. I thought about finding new story subjects for this article. But then I realized that since it was intended as a retrospective on the law, it might be interesting to check back in with people we'd previously covered to find out what had changed since we met them years ago. I'd never done that before.
What did you find most striking in your conversations with these people?
In a general sense, I'm always amazed and grateful that anyone would share details about their personal lives with us and our audience. And what's more personal than your health and your finances?
For this particular story, I found it interesting how varied everyone's experiences have been, and what lessons they have taken from them. For instance, several people only needed Obamacare benefits for a short time and are happier with the better coverage they have now from jobs, but are still appreciative that a safety net was there for them when they needed it.
Another thing is how most of the problems people encountered are the result of the private health care system underpinning the Affordable Care Act, not the law per se. Granted, leaving that system in place was a political choice Democrats made in 2010 and they theoretically could've tried something different. But for all the talk about Obamacare ruining the health care system, what's really happened is that the law didn't go far enough. There are still 28 million uninsured people and many more with bad coverage that doesn't provide enough financial protection (and that's all private insurance, not just Obamacare plans). And I don't know how anyone could read about this law saving people's lives and their finances and come away thinking it's worse than if Congress had done nothing 10 years ago because single-payer would've been better. Likewise, to support repealing this law is to support all those people being forced to suffer when they didn't have to.
This anniversary is happening at the same time as a health care crisis. Did that affect the way you wrote and thought about it?
Only in the back of my mind, really. An inescapable aspect of the coronavirus story is how vulnerable Americans are to high health care costs, subpar access to care, and insurance red tape that makes getting and affording medical care difficult. The coronavirus didn't create this problem, but it's going to exacerbate it. Jonathan Cohn's anniversary story directly addressed this, while mine mostly focused on looking backward through the eyes of the articles’ subjects.
You've been a health care reporter for many years. When you think about covering the ACA fight in Congress, plus everything that has happened since, what stands out the most to you?
Frankly, I can't believe we're still having the exact same political arguments about it. The rhetoric from the right has barely changed, and what hasn't changed at all is that Republicans have no plausible ideas to promote health coverage and affordable care for nearly as many people as the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, etc. Combine that with the law's actual shortcomings and flaws and you end up where we are now: living with a health care system we all know is imperfect because our leaders won't do anything about it. The ACA was supposed to be a first step, and we're stuck here indefinitely.
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