Goals of Healthcare Proposals of Obama and Romney - Essay Example

"Goals of Healthcare Proposals of Obama and Romney" is an interesting example of a paper on the health system.
Fundamentally, the healthcare proposals of both the candidates are different from each other as both candidates appear to have different views about the future of healthcare in America. Here is the Comparison and Contrast between the proposals of two candidates: 

Comparison and Contrast 

1. If re-elected, Obama will continue with the Affordable Care Act and will deliver what has been enacted in the Act to increase the number of insured for healthcare. Romney, however, opposes the Affordable Care Act and will replace it with his own version of the Healthcare act. This is also one of the basic and fundamental differences between the opinions of two leaders on the new legislative framework for improving healthcare in America. It is critical to note that the Affordable Care Act has been enacted in order to increase universal coverage. Therefore, it surely can have a maximum impact on citizens being affected by the introduction of affordable healthcare. (Collins, Guterman, and Nuzum). This can be argued on the basis that since the Act mandates the federal government to have full control over health benefits and financing, then access to the services might be cumbersome to some people. This means that the federal government has only a few insurance plans, which caters to less expensive treatments.   
2. Obama is pushing for universal coverage with tighter controls in order to increase the number of insured Americans. Romney, on the other hand, is not in favor of having universal healthcare insurance coverage for everyone. He, however, argues that more limited coverage can offer a relatively higher level of choices for individuals to go for healthcare insurance. This is dependent on the level of income of the Americans to choose the coverage of their choice. Nevertheless, this proposition seems to only favor the rich since the middle class may not be able to afford some insurance packages.  In addition, Romney supports the current health insurance system based on the current markets. Universal coverage may be good if implemented properly therefore from the perspective of implementation, the government needs to take effective measures to implement the same in its true spirit. 
3. Obama plans to offer Federal Tax Credits to improve the affordability of health insurance plans, thus, actually allowing more poor and low-income families to come under the Medicaid programs.  This is well stipulated in the ACA. On the other hand, Romney proposes to scale back the Federal funding for the insurance of low-income families. He proposes to provide individual tax treatment for health insurance with those provided to the employer-based plans (Boulton). His plan was to have Medicaid funding reduced. He argued that a portion of the cut would come from repealing the healthcare law’s Medicaid expansion. And another portion would reduce payments to states for Medicaid patients already covered.  
4. In order to improve the healthcare quality and also contain the increase in healthcare costs, Obama actually proposed to continue with the reforms given in the Act. Romney however, aims to improve competition between providers of private insurance and traditional insurance providers. Analytically, this could be a strategy to reduce costs and improvement of services.  

From the policy perspective, it is clear that Obama’s plan seeks continuity of what his government is currently doing. Though the reforms introduced by the Obama government are recent and have yet to produce any credible results, Romney seems to have relatively different views. It is more appropriate if the cost-benefit analysis is performed before actually reversing any actions in case Romney wins the election.