By Ashley Vitale
Contributing Writer

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been in the news frequently since its rocky rollout in October 2013. Since then, many people still do not fully understand the healthcare reform.

On Tuesday, Feb. 25, more than 200 Simmons students and faculty welcomed Dr. Jonathan Gruber for a lecture and discussion regarding healthcare reform, titled “Health Care Reform in the U.S.: Past, Present and Future.”

Gruber, a professor of Economics at MIT, is regarded as a chief architect of both Romneycare in Massachusetts and Obamacare.

Gruber began by giving a brief history of healthcare in the U.S. The nation has what he calls “a history of partial solutions” to our expensive privatized healthcare system.

According to Gruber, before the Massachusetts healthcare reform and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were being drafted, 80 million people in the U.S. were without health insurance. Even with an $850 billion health insurance industry, there was no guarantee of coverage.

Gruber captured his audience’s attention even more fully when he said, “Before the ACA, the U.S. was the only nation in the world where we subjected families to medical bankruptcy.”

Enter Romneycare. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts designed its healthcare reform plan as a “three-legged stool,” in Gruber’s words. The first leg stated that insurance companies must provide insurance whether or not a person was already sick, the second leg mandated that all Massachusetts citizens must buy insurance, and the third leg provided state subsidies for low-income families. Without any of these three components, the plan would have failed.

Thankfully, he explained, Romneycare was an incredible success. The state’s uninsured rate is at 3 percent, instead of the 18 percent national average.

This explains why the federal government would be interested in attempting a similar plan at the national level.

Gruber then began to lay out some of the common concerns about the ACA, commonly known as Obamacare. In response to claims that the act will increase the federal deficit, he said that it will instead lower the deficit fairly significantly. Although the ACA will raise taxes, it will cut spending. Gruber also made it very clear that no one can predict how costs for healthcare will change. The ACA is a step in the right direction to make healthcare more accessible to more people.

It is now on its final hurdle after being drafted. First it had to get passed, then it had to make it through the Supreme Court and the 2012 election, and now the ACA has to survive implementation. As of right now, Gruber reports that 75 percent of the projected enrollment in Obamacare is now enrolled online.

The discussion following Gruber’s lecture was full of several important questions from the Simmons community. Dean Judy Beal opened the session by askig to know what Obamacare would mean for nurses and nurse practitioners.

Several students asked questions regarding mental health coverage, reproductive health options, and wellness initiatives.

A social work faculty member asked if Obamacare was rightfully being called a route to a single-payer healthcare system.

Audio of the event is available at https://soundcloud.com/simmons-cas/health-care-reform-in-the-u-s .