The staying power of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) shows that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” according to John McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who helped craft the law as a senior Senate advisor. In a January 5, 2018 U.S. News & World Report article, McDonough compared the law to a car. While the law has retained scrapes and dents from Republican attempts to weaken it—such as discontinuing federal reimbursements to health insurers for providing discounted plans to low-income consumers, failing to promote sign-ups, and the new tax plan’s repeal of the individual mandate—it is still running, he said. New enrollments are close to the previous year’s numbers, and many low-income people may actually pay less for their insurance this year due to changes made by the insurance companies in response to the end of federal cost sharing payments.
McDonough said that the ACA is “going to have a much more durable life than any of the Republicans, or even a lot of Democrats, believed 12 months ago.”
Read U.S. News & World Report article: The Zombie Health Care Law
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