ObamaCare is the unofficial name for The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which was signed into law on March 23, 2010.
Background of the topic
The United States spends 17 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, by far the most of any nation in the world. Moreover, the rate of health care spending is rapidly outstripping the rate of growth of our economy, so that by 2080 health care spending is projected to account for 40 percent of the U.S. economy
Despite this high level of spending, there remain enormous disparities in access to health care in our nation. For example, the infant mortality rate for whites in the United States is 0.57 percent, while for blacks it is more than twice as high, at 1.35 percent.1 Many of these disparities can be attributed to the fact that the United States is the only major industrialized nation without universal access to health care. Almost one in five of the non-elderly, 50 million Americans, have no health insurance coverage. The distribution of insurance coverage . The primary source of insurance coverage in the United States is employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), which covers the majority of non-elderly Americans in the United States. This is due to both the risk pooling provided by the workplace setting and the large tax subsidy provided to ESI. As discussed in more detail in Gruber (2011b), the federal government forgoes roughly $250 billion per year by excluding compensation in the form of health insurance from income to ESI. As discussed in more detail in Gruber (2011b), the federal government forgoes roughly $250 billion per year by excluding compensation in the form of health insurance from income.There are also two major sources of public insurance coverage. The Medicare program is a universal insurance program for the elderly in the United States, while the Medicaid program provides coverage for many of the poor, with a particular focus on low income children. As a