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As the Supreme Court hears arguments for and against the Affordable Care Act, two professors from Princeton University and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government came to Yale to speak about health care reform in the United States.
At the talk, Amitabh Chandra, an economist and professor of public policy at Harvard, discussed specific problems with the nation’s health care system, such as inefficient coverage and costly treatments. Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton and former Pulitzer Prize winner, focused on issues that are currently before the Supreme Court, and explained his personal concerns that the ACA may be knocked down by the court.
Known to many as “Obamacare,” the ACA was signed into law in March 2010 and is the largest piece of health reform passed since Medicare was created in 1965. Proponents of the bill applaud it as long-overdue legislation, while dissidents say it oversteps the powers of Congress and will be ineffective. These arguments have also been made along strict party lines, with Democrats largely in support of the bill and Republicans mostly against it.
Starr spoke about the ACA’s controversial government mandate that requires all American citizens with sufficient resources to purchase health insurance fulfilling basic requirements. He said lawmakers would have benefited from advocating an automatic enrollment policy with an opt-out option rather than the mandate. Such an option he said would have prevented constitutional problems, he said, and still decreased the uninsured population because research has shown that people rarely opt out in similar situations.
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