Please respond to the following Health Care Policy post…
Health Care Policy
ACA, also known as Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 (Hall, A., & Lorde, R., 2014). This mandated health plan provides coverage for specified preventive items or services. The ACA covers recommended immunizations, recommended preventive care and screenings for women and children. Also, ACA is a health plan that provides dependent coverage of children for an unmarried, adult child until the child turns 26 years of age. The Affordable Care Act’s core achievement is to make all Americans insurable, by requiring insurers to accept all applicants at rates based on population averages regardless of health status (Affordable Care Act, 2016). The act also increases coverage by allowing states to expand Medicaid to cover everyone near the poverty line, and by subsidizing private insurance for people who are not poor but who do not have workplace coverage. The act allows most people to keep the same kind of insurance that they currently have, and it does not change how private insurance pays physicians and hospitals.
The ACA directly impacts delivery of care people without coverage or group insurance having difficulty obtaining individual insurance, not only because of its expense, but also because private insurers screen people for health status and either decline to cover people with potentially costly medical conditions, or charged them substantially more, or excluded coverage for their existing conditions.
A key challenge I anticipate is provider and hospital payment (Hall, A., & Lorde, R., 2014). Even though, it does not directly change how private insurers pay healthcare providers, direct client billing will pose a problem for collection. Nevertheless, it has set into motion market dynamics that are affecting medical practice, such as limiting insurance networks to fewer providers and requiring patients to pay for more treatment costs out of pocket.
References:
Affordable Care Act. (2016). Retrieved from: https://healthcare.gov/glossary/affordable-care-act/
Hall, A., & Lorde, R. (2014). Obamacare: what the Affordable Care Act means for patients and physicians [PDF]. Winston Salem: BMJ 2014;349:g5376 doi: 10.1136/bmj.g5376.