The Health Plan history

By 1990, NHE accounted for 12.1 percent of GDP — the largest increase thus far in the history of healthcare.

Shortly after President Clinton was inaugurated in January of 1993, he established a healthcare task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton.

Finally, by 1994, the original Blue Cross organization, which had grown significantly, allowed for subsidiaries to become for-profit insurers.

In 1996, Clinton signed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which established privacy standards for individuals.

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 expanded and formalized this option, later known as Medicare Part C or Medicare Advantage.

The Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA) made the biggest changes to the Medicare in the program in 38 years.

The price and importance of pharmaceutical drugs had increased sharply over the decades since Medicare's original passage, and by 2004 the average Medicare beneficiary was spending over $1,000 out-of-pocket each year on prescription drugs.

↑ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, "Brief Summaries of Medicare and Medicaid," November 2009

The 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as "Obamacare," introduced experimentation and uncertainty into the industry, which has been and will be watched closely over the next several years to gauge the lasting effects of its policies.

In 2012, 91 percent of doctors accepted new Medicare patients, while 71 percent accepted new Medicaid patients.

Today, the number of uninsured in the United States has declined for the first time since 2013.

But by 2014, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that Medicare Part D spending had proved lower than either estimate.

By 2015, about 15 million Medicare beneficiaries—30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries—were enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.

After the Affordable Care Act required all Americans to carry insurance in 2016, the uninsured number dropped by almost half to 28 million Americans.

Since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017, many have questioned what would happen with our healthcare system — specifically, what would happen to the ACA, since Donald Trump ran on a platform of “repealing and replacing” the bill.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the ACA has covered an average of 11.3 million annually since its inception, though 8.5% of the United States population (roughly 27.5 million Americans) remain uninsured, as reported by the KKF in 2018.