After yearlong tries of being repealed and replaced, ObamaCare somehow managed to survive showing surprising resilience towards all the attempts.
ObamaCare managed to sign a surprising number of people after the short enrollment period, according to the new law, ended the previous week. The records show an amazing statistics of 8.8 million enrollments – which is a little less than the last year’s number of 9.2 million.
The staggering number was achieved despite the continuous attacks by the Trump administration on the health-care law, outreach cut-backs and the shortened enrollment period which was almost half of what it had been previously.
As per the statistics, the enrollment numbers suggest that there is a certain group of people, no matter how small, what the lawmakers had imagined are in need of the health insurance and would be signing up irrespective of the obstacles in their way.
“The ACA seems to have more lives than your neighborhood cat,” said Larry Levitt, the expert on the health policy from Kaiser Family Foundation.
“It’s a smaller and less functional program than supporters had originally hoped, but it’s still doing the job of [keeping] the uninsured rate at the lowest level ever,” he added.
Even the Republicans seem to be losing their interest and passion in repealing the Obamacare, while some of the lawmakers are still rooting for the revival of the repealing efforts from the next year. The statistical data is indicative of the fact that this would still prove to be extremely difficult, and it is better to address more important issues at hand.
“I think we’ll probably move on to other issues,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the press in a statement.
Further, he went on to acknowledge later at a news conference that the Senators, Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, have the intentions to pursue the pushing of their repeal and replacement proposals during next year too and added simply, “I wish them well.”
Achieving a majority of 51 – 49, he was open to sharing his doubts about receiving enough votes to pass the legislation. Similarly, the polls for ObamaCare are showing that the approval for the health care is above 50 percent, while an exit poll suggested that the healthcare played a vital role in the turnout of voters in Virginia state, in the elections held in November last year.
Although the Republicans managed to give ObamaCare a huge setback, as they repealed the mandate requiring the people to buy the insurance or get a tax penalty.
Many of the lawmakers are of the opinion that this would make much of a difference to the Obamacare law, however, increase in premiums and dropping out of insurers from the market was expected.
Another one of the unexpected factors that had helped in bolstering the signups could be all of the publicity, ObamaCare received throughout the year as the Republicans kept on trying to repeal the law and failed to do so, causing ObamaCare to be a very hot topic in all the news and important discussions on the television.
“The negative publicity from the Trump administration, every newspaper had a story on a regular basis,” said Joe Antos, also a health-care expert from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
“Maybe it’s just the reminder that there’s health insurance out there,” he went on to add.
Meanwhile, the congress might eventually think about taking some bipartisan steps that may focus on the stabilization of the law during the next year, a step that has not been thought of since the implication of Obamacare.
“We want to steady the insurance markets if we can,” McConnell had said in a statement.