The Affordable Care Act

Civics 101

NHPR

History, Government, Society & Culture

4.2 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2018

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today's episode, we tackle a defining law from the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act -- better known as Obamacare. Some people love it, others hate it, but what did the law really do? Is American health care actually more, you know, affordable? And why is there so much talk of repealing the ACA? Our guide today is Julie Rovner, Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
0:05.0	I'm McCaffity Jane. I'm Ben Henry. I'm Han McCarthy. And today we're talking about the patient
0:09.1	protection and affordable care act. Otherwise known as a bomb of care. We're talking about a
0:14.0	bomb of care today. Yeah, a bomb of care. Yeah. That's how I know it. So guys, the reason I wanted
0:17.9	to talk about this is I saw this graph in the New York Times a couple weeks ago and I found it
0:24.2	shocking. What the graph shows is it lays out the amount of money that the United States spends
0:30.3	on healthcare per person compared to our life expectancy. How long we live in general, how,
0:36.8	you know, it's a measure of how healthy we are. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. It looks like
0:40.1	our life expectancy is like 79. Yeah, this graph shows that we spend way more money on healthcare
0:47.7	than other developed nations. And we don't live longer because of it compared to those other
0:53.6	nations. We're kind of somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of life expectancy. But we
0:57.6	are way ahead of the pack in terms of how much we spend per person. Way ahead. We're spending all
1:01.6	this money and it's not clear what we're getting out of this. And the reason of this article was
1:06.7	crazy to me is because the takeaway from the old article is that we don't really know why. We're
1:13.6	not sure why the cost of healthcare is so high in this country. I'm very keen to have a bomb of
1:19.9	care explained to me because I know sort of what it is, but I have no idea how the nuts and boats
1:25.5	bolts all work together for it. So we're talking to Julie Rovner. She's a Washington correspondent for
1:31.4	Kaiser Health News and she also hosts a podcast for them. And she is a veteran healthcare policy
1:38.3	reporter and guys, no questions too stupid. Oh, good. Thank God. We're going to figure out healthcare.
1:50.8	Julie, welcome to Civics 101. Thank you for having me. So set the stage for us. It's 2008.
1:56.9	Obama comes into office. What are the problems that he and his administration see in the US
2:02.4	healthcare system? Well, there were two big problems in 2008. One was the very large number of people
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