Question

Describe three aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that have already affected the way in which health is provided in the U.S. or that will affect it in the future.

Answer 1

There are certain health policies in the system that have impacted the citizen’s health in some way in US such as the mandatory policy of healthcare insurance coverage which in a way makes people’s life easier. People do not really have to wait for the last moment when their health shall indeed take a toll, to go and get themselves treated. Their healthcare coverage takes care of their health in particular.

In the US, the commitment to develop the healthcare sector in such a way that its benefits reach out to the larger part of the public, is considerably very high. Reforms have been proposed often in the past as well, with regards to the Healthcare sector; however, concretizing the same has at times been a cause of concern. Accordingly, one effective example of a system would be that pertaining to the healthcare system in US.

In the recent times, for establishing an effective system pertaining to the Healthcare, there was an enacting of the federal statutes i.e. Patient’s Protection and Affordable Act (PPACA) in 2010 which was later amended and brought into action with Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. However, apart from these two significant reforms, the rest of the reforms were simply proposed though not yet brought in force. Such reforms include a reduction in fee-for-service and single-payer system reforms. In this regard, various pilot projects have also been implemented to understand the feasibility of these reforms like PPACA conceived an agency called Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation for the same.

The reforms of PPCA were introduced at the time when the Obama Government was in power and hence it is at times referred as the ‘Obamacare’ reforms.

With regards to the interactions within the system as a Public Policy, it is to be noted that the Affordable Care Act affected the healthcare triangle at our facility considerably. These reforms impacted the patients like us in the sense that PPCA would phase-wise introduce a comprehensive system of healthcare insurance in order to help curb with the malpractices undertaken by many health insurance companies in terms of prior existence of condition screening, expensive premiums to buy the policies, cancelation of selling of policies to the public who already has certain illnesses and thereby refusing them to grant the policy, the coverage limitations for the policy holders, etc. This reform also undertook the Risk corridor program under which it targeted to include all those reluctant citizens who were not covered under any of the Health Insurance schemes. As a result of this reform, by 2016, the number of uninsured citizens fell down to approximately half of the total population size which speaks volumes about its success.    Further the patients could avail the benefits of the uniformity in premium irrespective to preexisting conditions with regards to the premium brackets for every age group. In order to limit the losses incurred by the insurer as well, a temporary reinsurance program for granting insurance to the insurers as against the unanticipated high claims. To the private insurance companies as well, this reform offers subsidies in the form of reduction in income taxes charged to these insurance players with the view that even the lower economic American class can afford to buy the insurance policies.

Further, with regards the system managed for optimization, in terms of the healthcare facility in our area, there had been some findings that are special worthwhile that are indeed a worthwhile need from the Act:

• With the Government attempting to cover everyone under the Healthcare insurance scheme, special efforts are also taken in the line of providing affordable healthcare for all the citizens. Accordingly, this program aims at providing healthcare services to the low-income elderly people which is a welfare concept all by itself.
• This program has developed all across the Nation with its prominence in the Care management arena with being extremely successful in the areas of offering the non-covered services such as Social Security entitlements, legal aid, and housing which is an extension of mere coverage of healthcare services to such individuals and hence a worthwhile benefit from this program.
• Owing to the continuous monitoring and evident success, this program has effectively contributed towards the care management in our Healthcare facility of the area to render services for the impaired elderly citizens with better links of it with acute and post-acute care.
• It has also become the revenue center for our healthcare triangle in the sense that it results in Medicaid eligibility determinations. Also the administrative cost in this program is not very high hence commendable.
• These activities are highly centric to the elderly care, the latter can take the advantage of various care management options available at their disposal, ours being one of them as well.

Hence in this way, the most recent care health reforms bills, have attempted to cover the patients at an affordable rate with whichever program possible in execution of the same.