Well, all the hoopla is over and and the campaigns have ended and I find myself in a position of having so many questions. I will admit up front to having been a sporadic voter, by that I mean there have been several elections in which I did not cast a vote. My primary reason was time. Not the time it took to vote but the time it took to get informed enough to vote. Even now I feel my votes where based on just the tiniest bits of actual information and mostly gut feeling. I am going to step out on a limb here and guess that I am not alone in this voting style.
But none of that matters until the next election and so, for me, today is more about trying to learn more about the impact of what has happened and to see if I can boil it down into pieces that 1) I can understand and 2) To determine what that means to me individually. This may sound completely self serving and in some ways it is but I am also the only test subject that I have complete access too. Having said this I will admit to this being one persons completely biased opinion right up front. However in order to be completely self serving I do owe it to myself to try to look at things from every angle don't I?
I know this morning and in the days ahead the economy will most likely continue to take center stage but my focus for this post is the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. To be honest I don't know what to call it. It seemed to me that the GOP originally coined the name Obamacare to discredit the Presidents plan but then Democrats decided to embrace the term and use it as their own and it is certainly the more well know name for Obama's Health Care Reform Bill, but in the interest of accuracy I will from here on out refer to it as the Affordable Care Act.
First a bit of history about me and health insurance. For most of my adult life I have had health insurance. There have been short periods and longer periods from a few months to over a year that I have gone without insurance. The longest stretch was the most recent and it wasn't until I started writing this that I started thinking about all the other times. When I graduated from college but hadn't found a job yet. I don't think I had any coverage then. Every time I changed jobs I lost the insurance coverage from my previous employer and had to wait the average 3-6 months before taking coverage and most recently having left the traditional job market. I am currently part time self-employed and part time waitress with health insurance coverage recently obtained under my husbands insurance. I will also note here that I pay the full amount with no contribution from my husbands employer. No judgement was meant by that statement I am just trying to lay out the facts.
Presuming that with Obama's re-election the Affordable Care Act will be fully implemented, here are some of my questions which I will attempt to research and answer for myself over the next few weeks. In an effort to answer the bigger questions of; Does this plan help me? And, do I think it helps America as a whole?
1) What are the basic components of the plan?
2) How will the plan be implemented and monitored?
3) What is the effect if any on small business?
4) Will part-time employees be covered under their employers insurance?
5) Is everyone covered?
6) How will gaps in employment be covered?
7) Will our elected officials be participating in this program?
8) What happened in the Supreme Courts Ruling?
9) What can we learn from other countries?
10) When does it all happen?
I fear already that this list may be more than I can handle and that my research will inevitably spark many more questions but I would like to know at least some of the answers and so I will begin here.
Comments