Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Roberts addressed the concern that the Affordable Care Act allows the federal government to strong-arm states in a lecture Tuesday afternoon, emphasizing that the law encourages states to adopt unique, innovative strategies for their health care systems. Roberts spoke to a packed room Tuesday at the Office of Continuing Education.
"The primary goal of Obamacare is the expansion of access to health insurance," Roberts told an audience consisting largely of students and faculty members at the Alpert Medical School. The form of this expansion will vary greatly from state to state since the government is "pushing states to innovate," she said, and a federal system will only be imposed on states that elect not to create a system of their own.
Several initiatives in Rhode Island are currently looking at how to adapt their system, Roberts said. "We can look at change and have the federal government pay the bill."
Small states like Rhode Island often have difficulty finding the resources to research avenues of medical reform, she said. But government grants under Obama have enabled the Women and Infants Hospital and the University of Rhode Island to embark on multi-million dollar projects examining ways to improve specific aspects of health care policy, she said.
Roberts stressed the importance of exploring new ways to improve health care while reducing costs, showing a graph depicting the rise of U.S. health care costs. "The status quo is not sustainable," she said. "We need to make sure we can move forward."
The federal government has charged each state with creating a user-friendly online marketplace for insurance where individuals whose health care is subsidized by the government and those who pay in full will be able to compare health care costs, she said. States that choose not to create their own marketplace can enroll in the federal exchange, she said.
Insurance companies will no longer be permitted to refuse coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, Roberts said. Medicaid will be expanded to include citizens under a certain income bracket, which will be 100 percent federally funded for the first three years. Though these changes will benefit some people, she said, for most of the audience members "nothing about this law changes your world."
She expressed hope that states will be less opposed to the new health care plan when they realize how much money they will receive from the federal government. She hopes innovations will encourage more research about population health - examining ways to prevent health problems by looking at factors such as clean air and healthy food that could prevent disease.
Roberts addressed what has been considered the most controversial aspect of Obamacare, the individual mandate, saying that the mandate is necessary to improve the entire system. "The more people that are in the pool (of health-insured citizens), the better we can evaluate the system," Roberts said. "Then we can look at reforming the system in a cost-effective way."
Roberts said the road forward may present challenges but added that the state is embracing the act. "We have decided to move forward here in Rhode Island," she said.
