Employee Benefit News for School, City and County Employers

Affordable Care Act still has hurdles to jump

Written by Valerie Ortiz | Jul 25, 2014 7:11:02 PM

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has shown some signs of success in its initial year, Drew Altman, president of Kaiser Family Foundation, explained the process of getting more people to sign up for health insurance will not come easy, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Altman believes the original people who signed up for healthcare were those specially seeking to be covered, but the hard part will getting those with language barriers, immigrants and others afraid of deportation will be more difficult, the source reported.

The 2014 enrollment success has been a great start for the new federal healthcare law since it reached its plan of 7 million enrollees by the open sign-up period deadline, USA Today reported.

However, Altman explained the president will have a difficult time reaching these people within the next two years of his administration, the Journal reported. At the same time, a recent survey shows that between 8 and 9.5 million fewer adults are uninsured compared to 2013, before the ACA was instated.

There are still tens of millions of U.S. citizens that are still not covered with health insurance, but new open enrollment periods could help drop that number.