Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump pronounced that he would implement fundamental changes to the American health insurance system.
What is the Obamacare Act?
The Obamacare law or Affordable Care Act -ACAchampioned and signed into law by Barack Obama, made health insurance compulsory for all Americans, with a few exceptions. Beneficial for some, the law has meant paying higher premiums and receiving less reimbursement for medical expenses.
The limits of the Obamacare law
The limitation of the Obamacare law is that nothing has been put in place to counter the very sharp rise in medical costs in the United States. Several factors account for this disproportionate medical cost:
- High drug prices, which partly fund pharmaceutical industry research
- Totally free consultation fees, enabling doctors to repay the loans they have taken out to study at renowned universities, pay their professional liability insurance premiums and earn a good living.
- Increasingly high-tech medical equipment
- Medical choices often consist of all sorts of analyses before making a diagnosis…etc.
The question of how to pay for healthcare in the United States remains unanswered.
Obamacare and Trump
Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 20, 2017 toease the insurance constraints of the ACA.
It gives U.S. state medical insurance agencies the ability to waive, defer, grant ¬exemptions from or delay” ACA rules. This will probably enable American insurers to incorporate more extensive medical exclusions into their policies, and make it more difficult to understand American insurance contracts.
For expatriates in the U.S., keeping international expatriate insurance remains a good solution, protecting them from changes in U.S. insurance policies while still being covered in the U.S. and worldwide.
