Impacts of Affordable Care Act and the Importance of ACA over COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes several key provisions. This paper assessed and discussed the impacts of these key provisions on health insurance coverage, federal and state spending, and other important social impacts on racial disparities, fiscal federalism as well as the accessibility and affordability of health insurance care. To analyze and exploit the health insurance coverage and spending, the Difference-in-Differences (DID) Regression Model and the Event-Study Regression Model were used. It can be seen that Medicaid coverage was indeed highly increased with appropriately 3% and uninsured rate was significantly decreased in ACA's Medicaid expansion States. While a slight increase of Federal spending on Medicaid expansion with appropriately 8%, state Medicaid expanded spending kept still and no significant adverse impacts on other state spending areas. Furthermore, this paper discussed and provided the importance of implementing ACA during COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of Macroeconomic, labor market, health insurance system, and social racial disparities. Consequently, ACA should keep fully implementing and enacting to mitigate and offset the loss of COVID-19 pandemic.