Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
Though not all parts of the law have been enacted yet, officials say that 61.5 million people have benefited from the law in the past year.
In its first year of existence, the law made it possible for uninsured young adults to stay on their family health insurance until age 26, it made changes in the Medicare system and removed pre-existing condition insurance exclusions for children.
The law also gave tax credits to small businesses in an effort to help offset the cost of health insurance to employees.
Ideally, the law should provide more than half of the currently uninsured 50 million Americans with health insurance.
This health care reform law came under fire last year and a recent study by the Kaiser Foundation shows that public opinion has not shifted much in the year following its enactment.
American voters still seem to be divided almost in half over the PPACA. The Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that 46 percent viewed the law unfavorably and 42 percent have maintained a favorable view.
Just over half of Americans, 53 percent, say they are confused about the law as a whole.
A comparable percentage, 47 percent, reported that they lacked enough information to determine how the law would affect them personally.
“The law is very large and complex, and a lot of the details aren’t in the statute; they’ll emerge from thousands of pages of health-care regulations issued over the next six years,” SMU law professor Thomas Mayo said.
Public opinion of the law also held true to partisan divides. More then two-thirds of Democrats favored the law in this month’s poll and 91 percent of Republicans opposed it.
The Kaiser analysis states that these results remain “essentially unchanged” from the previous year.
“Health care economics and policy is an abstruse field that many people don’t have the time or inclination to master, so they are largely dependent on the chattering class and politicians to explain the meaning of the law,” Mayo said.
However, the law is still hotly contested across the country.
Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison spoke Tuesday about what she believes are the damaging effects of this law.
“It becomes clearer every day that we must repeal the health spending law,” Senator Hutchison said in her speech.
“We must replace it with commonsense, step-by-step reforms that Americans want and will actually lower health care costs,” she said.
Mayo disagrees and thinks that the PPACA has begun to fulfill its function.
“The main purpose behind PPACA was to reform private health insurance to curb what were widely perceived to be abusive and counter-productive underwriting practices, expand coverage, and begin to rein in spiraling health care costs,” Mayo said. “There’s a nod in the direction of improving quality, but that will have to come later.”
