2018 ACA Enrollment Starts Today

The United States has tried to pass some form of comprehensive health care legislation since the late 19th Century.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attempted to do as part of Social Security  was the first to attempt to do so, but was vehemently opposed by the American Medical Association.

President Harry S Truman attempted to do so as part of his Fair Deal, but also ran into AMA opposition .   That same AMA opposition was present when President Lyndon B. Johnson got Medicare and Medicaid passed in 1965, and a serious effort to do so happened during the Nixon and Clinton and Obama administrations.

To tackle the problem of over 40 million Americans being uninsured, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed and signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010.

The Affordable Care Act cut the number of uninsured Americans in half, slowing down the rapid rise in health care costs and acted as a stimulus that fueled national economic growth.

It also has saved lives in the process.

But despite the obvious benefits of the ACA, the law has been under attack by the Republican Party since its passage.  With Donald Trump now in the White House, Republicans see an opportunity to repeal the law and replace it with their own plan.   Those efforts have already failed, and were opposed by much of the American population that likes many of the ACA's more popular features like allowing dependents to stay on their parent's health insurance plans until age 26,  no preexisting conditions or coverage caps.

The Trump administration is resorting to other methods to kill the ACA by starving it of funding,  cutting the advertising budget to publicize 2018 ACA enrollment by 90% and the cut of funding for the Navigator program from $62.4 million to $36.8 million.

They cynically hope that the less people know about when to re-enroll for 2018 ACA coverage, it will cause the overall numbers of people enrolled to drop and then the conservative  'the ACA is failing' propaganda has a veneer of plausibility.

So let's commit a revolutionary act and thwart those plans.

The 2018 enrollment period for the ACA starts today, November 1 and runs through December 15th.   It's time once again to get covered, and there are people and organizations out there in your locale who will help you try to get the health care coverage you need that fits your budget. 

Here's the link to Healthcare.Gov to get you started.