Obamacare Delays

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act since its launch in March in the year 2010 made some of the most remarkable and sweeping changes in the genre of health care and medical care services under the guidelines of the then president of the United States Barak Obama. Since the advent of the Affordable Care or Obama Care approximately around 20 million of the United States citizens came under the purview of the legislation.  The Affordable Care Act is a colossal law, stating hundreds of requirements and conditions on federal agencies and private entities. Many provisions of the law provides effective dates by which the programs to be put into effect. Although the vast bulk of these provisions have been implemented on time, it has not been possible to meet all the deadlines of the programs due to a variety of elements.

Reasons for delay in implementing policies under Obama Care.

The possible reasons that acted as a catalyst for delaying or implementing the projects are –

i) Having limited resources for implementing the law as the Congress has failed to appropriate any funds for this purpose since the ACA was passed.

ii) Technological limitations include the launch of the problematic website.

iii) The need to launch and implement the program stepwise and in a rational manner was not followed. And also the need to avoid unnecessary disruption of employment and insurance markets were not followed properly.

The Obama Care is considered as the striking or remarkable reform in the health care scenario of the country and it has undergone through lots of changes since its inception till date in various fields or genres of the law. Let us now discuss or talk about the changes and delays done to date in the health care reform.

The delays that were done to Obama Care.

The different genres that witnessed delays under Obama Care are-

i) Delay in implementing Employer Mandate– The mandate for employers stated that an organization with fifty or more than fifty full-time or equivalent employees serving or working for forty hours in a week to be provided with health coverage and if they are not provided with appropriate medical insurance coverage will be charged with was delayed from 2014 to 2016.

ii) Delay in implementing Individual Mandate– The individual mandate under the Obama Care which stated that each and every citizen of the United States of America need to have or apply for health insurance coverage or otherwise they will be entitled to penalty charges also delayed in its implementation process.   

ii) SHOP or Small Business Health Options Delay – Under the Obama Care’s open enrollment for small business ventures originally started during 2014 open enrollment. But however, the SHOP marketplace that allows businesses with 50 or less full-time equivalent employees to enroll didn’t begin until the open enrollment period of 2015.

The changes done to the health care law helped to make new reforms to the law and at the same time the same time the delays in implementing the policies gave birth to some kind of confusion among the citizens.