Affordable Care Act - Essay Example

This memo will investigate the impact of ACA on Employer-Sponsored Insurance (ESI) and will specifically examine various aspects of the Act that can discourage large employers’ to offer healthcare coverage to their employees. This can ultimately result in reduced access and quality of the healthcare services and increased costs. ACA is a law of primary importance for the people of United States because it aims to address many long standing issues with our health insurance policies including the coverage of children on parental policy, cessation of ‘donut hole’ for seniors, elimination of lifetime dollar limit on coverage, free preventive care and many other provisions with an aim to cover every segment of the society to maximum possible limit of coverage, even the uninsured people with a program to extend access to insurance and more funds to states to help them in extending Medicare facilities to low-income seniors.

In essence, the program is a tremendous effort to fill the gaps of insurance coverage while safeguarding the rights of stakeholders. Still, there are areas which required attention of the legislators to device some amendments in the program in order to ensure and extend its impact on access, cost and quality of health care services. The employer sponsored insurance coverage is the hottest among the controversial issues associated with provisions of ACA that are supposed to be in effect by 2014.

There are two major aspects of the ACA provisions, firstly the impact of Tax Credits to small businesses and its impact on coverage offers by the employer to low and medium salaried employees and secondly the impact on large employers after 2014 when the law will be in effect with all its provisions. The employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) is of immense importance to the American people because larger employers plays an important role in overall health insurance coverage and if these firms decided to drop the coverage its impact will certainly deplore the positivity of the ACA.

However, there is a clear divide among the experts and analyst over the estimates of large firms’ response in 2014. Some forecast a big drop in ESI and other estimate it to be stable. “ While the overall ESI market is likely to remain fairly stable, modelers and other experts agree that some firm types and covered subgroups are likely to experience changes in coverage soon after 2014.” (Avalere, 2011). Although most of the surveys and analysis project a stable ESI market in post-2014 scenario, there are experts, firms and analyst who oppose with some valuable reasoning and proclaim that ACA provisions can cause a major shift in employers’ policy of health insurance offerings.

“Overall, 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI in the years after 2014.” (Singhal, Jeris, & Drew, 2011). This is certainly an alarming statement because of heavy reliance of nonelderly Americans on employer-sponsored health services and no real solution of increased healthcare access and quality can prove beneficial unless it addresses this sector correctly and U.S. Department of Healthcare and Human Services is aware of the fact, “The U.S. employer-based health insurance market provides insurance coverage to nearly two-thirds of the population under 65.

In addition, nearly 80 percent of the uninsured live in a family where at least one adult is employed. Therefore, building on these programs might be an attractive component of any