THE future of the Affordable Care Act—the ambitious, sprawling law better known as Obamacare—depends in part on modest places like Horizon Health Centre, in Jersey City. Its small lobby, with fluorescent lights and linoleum floor, boasts a framed thank-you note from the president. Horizon is, first, a clinic. It mostly treats black patients, Hispanics and immigrants from the Middle East. For the past two years, however, Horizon has also helped them get insurance. Staff have extolled Obamacare at churches and mosques, at meetings for students and meetings for prisoners. Now they are at it again.
It is sign-up season for Obamacare. On November 1st the law’s online exchanges opened for business, selling policies that begin in January. This year’s “open enrolment”, in certain respects, shows the law’s progress. In 2013 Obamacare’s computer programs sputtered. Horizon’s Nastassia Fleischer had to help clients sign up by phone. “This year the website is working great,” she says. More important, after years of touting Obamacare’s theoretical benefits, Democrats can now point to some real ones. In the past two years 17.6m have gained insurance. As with so much about the health law, however, Obamacare’s record remains devilishly complex.
That is inevitable, given the law’s tangled design. Obamacare bars insurers from raising costs for...Continue reading
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