The Economics of Obamacare

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as ObamaCare or PPACA), which was signed into US law in 2010, generated a lot of noise from both supporters and detractors. This book argues that the changes introduced by ObamaCare were, in the long history of government intervention in the US health system, generally not as new or novel as claimed.

The scope of the changes introduced by ObamaCare is very wide and covers, among others: the health insurance industry, pharmaceuticals, employers, employees, or the uninsured. The structure of the book shows the individual causes, key assumptions, and impacts of the reform on individual elements or areas of the US health system. One of the most important aspects of the work is analysis of the phenomenon of the so-called ’death spiral’. The changes introduced by ObamaCare reform make it possible to investigate the causes of this phenomenon on a country-wide scale and enable a broader analysis of its effects.

The book will be of great interest to readers in the economics, management and policy of health and health care.

Lukasz Jasiński is an assistant professor employed at the Faculty of Economics of the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University (Poland, Lublin). In 2021, he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled Market processes and interventionism in the health system of the United States of America from the view of the Austrian school of economics.

He is also an economist at the Mises Institute of Economic Education (Poland, Wroclaw), where he publishes his original series of essays entitled On the way to the market health system.

In 2022, on the basis of the decision of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Lublin branch), his book, entitled Markets vs Public Health Systems: Perspectives from the Austrian School of Economics, was selected for the best research work for 2021 (Humanities and Social Sciences).