Healthcare Proposals of Obama and Romney - Essay Example

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 opinion 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 maximum impact on the number of people being affected by the introduction of affordable healthcare. (Collins, Guterman and Nuzum)
2. Obama is pushing for universal coverage with tighter controls in order to increase the no of insured. 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 to individuals to go for healthcare insurance. Romney however 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 program. 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 the health insurance with those provided to the employer-based plans. (Boulton)
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, is more in favor of providing fixed budgets as well as loses standards for the State Medicaid program. Romney also aims to improve competition between providers of private insurance and traditional insurance providers. He suggests that if cost is not reduced then there will be limits on annual spending.

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, however, Romney seems to have relatively different views.  From the Policy perspective, Romney’s actions may entirely reverse the actions taken by Obama and hence can actually increase the overall cost for the Federal as well as State governments. It is more appropriate if the cost-benefit analysis is performed before actually reversing any actions in case Romney wins the election.