Even though the Affordable Care Act was passed into law in 2010 and has already begun making significant changes in how Americans find, pay for, and keep healthcare insurance, millions of Americans remain woefully uninformed about this important legislation, commonly referred to as Obamacare.
The law not only affects those on Medicaid in states that have chosen to adopt the expanded program, but it also affects millions of other Americans who have had difficulty obtaining and paying for health insurance in the past.
According to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching healthcare related issues, about 42% of Americans either know very little about the law or are wrong about its legal status.
The survey results showed that 12% of Americans believe that Congress has repealed the law. Even though multiple bills have been introduced that would repeal the Affordable Care Act, none of them have passed and the law has not been repealed.
Additionally, 7% of Americans believe that the Supreme Court of the United States has declared the law unconstitutional. While the court did hear several challenges to the law and ruled that the mandatory Medicaid expansion provisions were unconstitutional, it did not overturn the rest of it. The Supreme Court’s ruling effectively gave each state the right to decide if it wanted to expand Medicaid as the law outlined.
If you’d like to know more about the law, its provisions, and when those provisions take effect, you can visit HealthCare.gov.
