10 Years Later, Obamacare ’s Complicated Legacy Still Shapes the Nation

Maurine Stuart credits the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for saving her family. In 2014, Stuart was diagnosed with HELLP syndrome, a rare disease that causes heart, liver and lymphatic problems. As a result, she was unable to continue working full time—which meant losing her employer-sponsored health insurance. But thankfully, she says, that same year, her home state of West Virginia opted in to the 2010 Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid-coverage expansion, and she qualified. Over the next few years, as bad news kept rolling in, ACA protections continued to keep Stuart’s family afloat. When Stuart was diagnosed with breast cancer, when her sister was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and when her daughter Peyton began having seizures, the ACA consistently offered avenues of affordable care. Stuart and her sister received coverage under the Medicaid expansion, while Peyton got it through the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which had been strengthened under the ACA. Stuart says the ACA not only gave her and her family access to the treatments they needed, it also changed their mentality about when to seek out professional care in the first place. When she and her siblings were growing up in California in the 1980s and ’90s, they couldn’t afford health care, Stuart says. “The criteria for going to the doctor was, ‘Are you bleeding? Have you lost a limb?'” Her father and brother never shook that idea, Stuart says. Despite the passa...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news