The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became a law on March 23, 2010. The health and Education Reconciliation Act amended it. The act was promulgated to ensure universal health coverage to all people. The implementation of the law is available in the Obama Administration’s information portal. Therefore, the paper will discuss whether the PPACA legislation was a liability or an improvement in the health care delivery system. Besides, the act’s pros and cons will be analyzed to understand the implication of the act.
Key Elements of the Act
The law provided extensions in the health system absent in providing affordable healthcare in the United States. It provides universal health coverage from birth to retirement period. Upon its implementation, it decreased the number of uninsured people by half, and they got access to health insurance cover. It aimed to provide 94% universal coverage to the American population and reduce the uninsured level by 31million people. Consequently, Medicaid was expected to increase enrollment by 15million people, thus remaining with only 24 million people without health coverage.
The Act’s central theme was to ensure shared responsibilities among individuals, government, and employers to achieve universal health coverage. Second, it was implemented to improve the quality, affordability, and fairness of the scheme (United States Congress, 2016). Third, it was expected to reduce wasteful expenditure while creating an accountable healthcare system for America’s diversified citizens. The legislation’s fourth prospect was to improve healthcare access by providing long-term changes in achieving preventive and primary health care. Finally, it was aimed to establish strategic public health investments by expanding community investment and clinical preventive care.
The implication of the PPACA Legislation
Legislations have both negative and positive impacts on their implementation. However, the PPACA legislation was more of an improvement to health care than being a liability. The improvement side outshines the liability side. Therefore, the study upholds that the legislation improved the health care sector in the United States.
The legislation brought health insurance coverage forms. It led to creating cost-sharing subsidies and premiums that established modern regulations. Doing so created a health-market insurance purchasing. It made insurance coverage for health to achieve legal expectations among US people and those legally present in America (Béland, Rocco, & Waddan, 2016). The Health Care Act provided an alternative to people who could not afford Medicare and Medicaid due to financial constraints. All people were able to access affordable health insurance even if you lacked an employer coverage scheme.
The coverage scheme is only available to legally citizens of the United States and excludes illegal citizens. Similarly, the law exempts people who feel that the law contravenes their religious and cultural beliefs. However, the law is mandatory to regulate premium insurance companies. They do not exploit their clients by introducing discriminatory pricing, thus protecting their customers from adverse selection by the coverage schemes.
The Affordable Care Act led to shared responsibilities for the sponsored employer-health benefit, small-group markets, and individuals by expanding federal standards in offering insurance. The previous regulations exempted health coverage of children younger than 19 years old, while the universal health scheme covers all people regardless of age (Kinney, 2015). The discrimination in the insurance pricing came to an end when the law was put into practice in 2014.
The Act set a range of state regulations for the insurance company that provides coverage products to people by banning discrimination for children, women, and older people who did not fit in the matrix of perfect health. It led to the exclusion of annual dollar coverage limitations and reframed so that pricing can only vary to a limited degree depending on family size, age, and tobacco use. Additionally, the law provides impartial appeal for internal and external procedures whenever coverage is denied, especially for cancer and other chronic diseases.
The plan was supposed to provide preventive amenities to women, children’s adolescent through the Health Resource and Services Administration intervention. The same program was envisaged in Medicare and Medicaid as a parallel form in covering eligible adults, although preventive services were optional to interested parties. The act encouraged employers to integrate workplace wellness practices by providing incentives and promoting health outcomes (Overbeck, Belmas, & Shepard, 2015). Employers are encouraged to provide incentives to their employees to get access to affordable health care.
The Act has improved accountability, efficiency, and healthcare quality. It has an obligation beyond insurance by ensuring transparency dominates in the healthcare system. It has led to the realignment of Medicare and Medicaid programs with new testing models that ensure transparency n payment and service delivery, especially for home care (Béland, Rocco, & Waddan, 2016). It ensured health system employ professional ethics in an integrated manner, measuring and reporting quality of healthcare and quality improvement for chronic and serious diseases that require admission and readmission.
The Act has made primary healthcare accessible to medically underserved societies. In America, it is approximated that 60 million people are medically underserved because of combined high health challenges resulting from inefficient primary healthcare experts. The US government was supposed to invest in the community health care centers expansion with $11billion and $1.5 billion in health centers and National Health Service Corps in the fiscal year 2011 to 2015
It was aimed to improve training health and public health professionals to rationalize healthcare. The Act allowed the training of new health professionals to intensify the increasing demand for healthcare services (United States. Congress, 2016). Finally, the Act provided long-term care by developing community–based care to protect spouses suffering from terminal diseases from being impoverished.