Dear editor,

As a former health care professional working with employers, insurers, patients state/federal health care programs, I have long been frustrated by the disjointed, expensive, ineffective and unfair way our health care system works in the U.S.

While not perfect, the Affordable Healthcare Act  (Obamacare) goes a long way toward fixing the problem. While the bill doesn’t go fully into effect until 2014, millions of lives have already been positively impacted.

In 2011, the law required that young adults be allowed to stay on their parent’s healthcare plan up to age 26. For the many young people, including my daughter, who don’t have a job or one that provides health insurance, they can now get insurance. In the first nine months alone, 2,500,000 young adults got this insurance.

If you are a senior, you saw your prescription drug costs reduced by 50 percent and can get a yearly physical and some screenings with no co-pay. These early intervention services save health care dollars by identifying problems early on.  An ounce of prevention is always worth more than a pound of cure. Twenty-four thousand seniors had gone in for screenings under this new plan just this year. And if you have an employer-sponsored private plan created after March 2010, you are also eligible for annual screening, physicals and immunizations without a co-pay.

The bill’s Medicare fraud detection feature is already saving billions. Finally Medicare has the sophisticated software to detect fraud that insurance companies have been using for years. As a result, fraud prosecutions were up 89 percent and the government recovered $2.9 billion in fraud in the first nine months of the program.  And that is just the beginning of savings.

Last and not least, persons with pre-existing conditions who cannot get insurance elsewhere can get coverage through a special government pool, the PCIP.gov. This will hold over until 2014, when the law requires elimination of pre-existing condition clauses from all insurance polices.

Whether you call it Obamacare, the Affordable Health Care Act or just health care reform, these are impressive accomplishments from such a misunderstood and much maligned bill.  Finally we see a long term, well thought out approach to a monster problem.

I thank President Obama, Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin, who had the courage and foresight to do what was needed to be done for a more efficient, fair and comprehensive health care system in the U.S.

Sincerely,

Cindy Ellis

Sawyer