Affordable Care Act opens year three of enrollment

Now, three years since the Affordable Care Act’s first round of open enrollment, many Americans have yet to determine its long-term effects.

Brian Toomey, chief executive director of Piedmont Health, which holds 10 locations throughout the state, said people in Carrboro and all over North Carolina are reaping the Act’s benefits.

“We think that’s been able to make a huge difference in people’s lives because for the first time, we’ve felt like they’ve had a safety net that most people have never had in their lives,” Toomey said.

Toomey said the plan has helped these patients and has also been beneficial to physicians.

“It’s allowed us to really focus on the care. It’s freed us up to only focus on the care services rather than how we can help them get other services,” he said. “It’s a relief.”

Twila Brase, president of the right-leaning Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, said the Affordable Care Act brings more detriments than benefits.

“We look at the Affordable Care Act as a takeover of the health care system by the federal government,” she said.

“It gathers information on the client and then imposes penalties for not purchasing this expensive product.”

Brase said Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, so far, does not agree with any presidential hopeful on the Affordable Care Act — Republican or Democrat — but the group does want to see the Act repealed.

Katherine Restrepo, health and human services policy analyst at the right-leaning John Locke Foundation, said, in an email, that the Affordable Care Act focuses too much on increasing insurance coverage rather than increasing access to health care needs.

“A health reform proposal that would fix this dilemma is to repeal the excessive amount of regulations imposed upon insurers and the health care industry as a whole,” she said.

Restrepo said the Affordable Care Act reduced competition in the health care field, which served to drive up health care prices.

“Put simply, the ACA is not an effective way to solve our nation’s health care problems,” she said in the email. “Less government involvement is the way to go.”

Brase said, to lower prices, third-parties should be removed from the system entirely. Pay at the moment of service clinics, which are available in Tennessee, are the best option for health care, she said.

“The costs are sometimes 80 to 90 percent less than the hospital up the street,” Brase said.

“That’s the way to make health care affordable.”

Toomey said the only disappointment Piedmont Health sees in the Affordable Care Act is North Carolina’s decision not to expand Medicaid.

“There is no other economic incentive that would have a more direct impact on all areas of this state than direct Medicaid expansion,” Toomey said.

“To see the difference it makes in the lives of those who can get coverage and to see people in this state who still can’t get coverage is sad.”

Overall, Toomey said the Act has focused health care providers on what matters: care.

“There is something wrong when the anxiety about medical care is not about your illness, but about whether or not you can afford that care or if it would bankrupt you,” Toomey said. “We think worrying about getting yourself care should be the focus.”

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