Idiosyncrasies of the 2010 Affordable Care Act from a Comparative Perspective

This article examines the particularities of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in a historical comparative perspective. Comparisons are made to highlight the specificities of the American welfare state and of health legislation in particular. The comparisons with European cou...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lea Stephan
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SAES 2017-04-01
Series:Angles
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Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/angles/1598
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Summary:This article examines the particularities of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in a historical comparative perspective. Comparisons are made to highlight the specificities of the American welfare state and of health legislation in particular. The comparisons with European countries aim at highlighting the particularity of racial division among the American working and middle class that hampered the expansion of the American welfare state and how this impacted the ACA. Despite certain shortcomings resulting of the idiosyncrasies of America’s welfare state and political system (the single payer system was not considered, Medicaid expansion is now optional, a market-based system), the ACA nonetheless managed to circumvent some problems due to the racialization of social policies and found ways to address some of the needs of minority populations by targeting specific issues that are particularly problematic for those populations.
ISSN:2274-2042