MOSCOW, August 5 (RIA Novosti) – The US Affordable Care Act has apparently failed to live up to its name as more Americans are now looking for cheaper – and somewhat dangerous – alternatives on the Internet, The Washington Post reported.
This practice stems from “the absurd, nonsensical and inexplicably unfathomable pricing of US health care,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center, said, the newspaper reported.
One of the results of the “unaffordable care act,” a landmark initiative of US President Barack Obama, is the emergence of MediBid, an online medical auction that links up self-paying patients and doctors who wish to prevent insurance companies from carving out large chunks of clients’ payments.
Caplan warned, however, that health care is “not like buying a watch on the street or a hotel room online. The stakes are much, much higher,” the D.C.-based daily quoted him as saying.
Unlike regular hospitals, medical centers that are vetted by MediBid are less strictly regulated and are often exempt from the requirement to monitor their patients after services have been provided.
What is more, the auction does not verify doctors' credentials but merely requires that they submit their medical license number for patients to check themselves. Complications are hardly ever covered by MediBid.
And yet, despite the risk of free-market health care, the option for some Americans is between the services of a medical center and a life of pain as the number of those unable to pay $300 monthly premiums or meet out-of-pocket obligations is considerably high.
The Obama administration has even been forced to give away billions of dollars to help some 4.7 million people buy insurance on HealthCare.gov, prompting two federal appeals panels to disagree on the legality of these subsidies.
The US Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, was signed into law to reform the federal health care system by President Obama in 2010 and upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012. Its stated goal is to give more US citizens access to affordable, quality health insurance, and to reduce the growth in health care spending in the United States.
