ACA Eased the Financial Burden on Families

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has reduced families’ medical costs significantly.

The ACA’s main goal was to provide coverage for the first time to workers who lack employer health insurance. But the expansion of free or subsidized health care to millions of parents with low and modest incomes has improved their financial stability and freed up money for their families’ other critical needs, concluded a new University of California at Davis study.

The main way the ACA expanded coverage was by giving states the option of providing Medicaid to workers earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The law also increased the number of children with health insurance, because federal and state outreach during the Medicaid expansion raised parents’ awareness of two separate insurance programs that had long been available to children: Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. To help families with modest incomes, the health care law put a cap on their annual medical spending.

Prior to the ACA’s passage, out-of-pocket medical costs were a high financial burden for 15 percent of U.S. families. That has fallen to about 10 percent of families in the years since passage, the researchers said.

What qualifies as a high cost burden depends on the family’s income. One example: the researchers determined that a family earning $75,000 had a high cost burden if they paid more than 8.35 percent of their income for out-of-pocket deductibles and copayments.

However, the study is not a current picture of the situation, because it was based on data from health care spending surveys in 2000 through 2017, prior to the pandemic. During the past year, millions of people were laid off and lost their employer health insurance when they may need it most.

But the ACA’s benefits are clear, the researchers said. Another aspect of the reform was to allow workers who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid to purchase subsidized private health insurance on the state exchanges. The law capped the total that workers spend on health care – once they reach the cap, their care is fully covered.

Tax subsidies also offset part of the monthly premiums for workers earning less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level. However, as people move toward the top of the income ceiling, the subsidies shrink and do very little to counteract the rising premiums overall, the researchers found.

Despite this shortcoming, the law needs to be preserved, they said – even better, it could be improved to “increase coverage and affordability for parents.”

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