The cost of healthcare influence the budget drawn by the federal government, the financial status of all the American citizens, and the nation’s economy. The insurance on healthcare that the government has offered has increased the life span of the American population, quality of health, the productivity of the people in various fields of work, and excelling of the American students in school. As a long-serving nurse, I witnessed the high costs in healthcare when Obama rose to office, and at the time, a huge number of the American population did not have life assurance covers. In his administration, he identified that the healthcare sector required a comprehensive reform. Such reforms resulted in the initiation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act), which has had advanced progress in addressing the mentioned problems in the healthcare sector. The American population can recently boast of improved healthcare insurance in their entire lives. The act also presented solutions for mitigating the challenges arising from the high costs of healthcare (Weaks, 2021). Yet, the fight towards affordable, convenient, and high-quality healthcare provision is not over.
Since the initiation of ACA, it has demonstrated multiple advantages in the American healthcare system. One of such advancements is the fact that it has promoted new delivery or payment models. An example is bundled payment which allows the insurer to make one payment for multiple procedures in medicine. McClellan et al. (2017), among other researchers, have mentioned that the concept of bundled payment is significant in improving the satisfaction of patients and reducing the cost of treatment. The further considerable progress that the ACA has made is improving electric medical records. With the implementation of the HITECH Act in the ARRA, there was an adoption of technology in the healthcare system. There was an allocation of money to different physicians to establish technological appliances in their day-to-day operations, significantly simplifying information storage and retrieval in the healthcare system. The implementation of ACA has also largely narrowed the provider networks. Such enactments have been possible since the ACA has promoted consumer protection measures, for instance, the ban of medical underwriting, which has stopped multiple individuals from applying the traditional approaches to keep low charges. Other law implementations like the provision of online market platforms in which people can compare the premiums have given the insurers a free space of competition. Plans that constitute narrow networks can accrue benefits to consumers by reducing their premium rates.
I have immense pride in the changes that ACA and the advancements have made that its policies have initiated towards realizing more convenient, high-quality, and affordable healthcare services in the US. These advancements and reforms notwithstanding, a huge American population is still struggling to afford visits to their doctors and prescriptions costs, pay their deductibles, or cover the monthly insurance payments, strain with the navigate a complex and at times confusing systems, thus remaining uninsured. In my view, therefore, there is still a need to continue pressing for reforms in the American healthcare system. With insight from the provision of coverage laws, experience has shown that the marketplace of health insurance is a feasible origin of millions of individuals and will remain so in the coming decades. Therefore, both the policymakers and the insurers have the obligation of learning how to improve the concept to cover as many individuals as possible. Secondly, several individuals do not have covers since they are not aware of financial assistance in the recent laws, yet, numerous others could get aid to congressional participation to improve the financial support. Also, many more measures can be put in place to enhance marketplace competition among insurers to increase the number of insured individuals and lower the costs further in the country.
References
McClellan, M. B., Feinberg, D. T., Bach, P. B., Chew, P., Conway, P., Leschly, N., & Teeter, D. (2017). Payment reform for better value and medical innovation. NAM Perspectives. https://nam.edu/payment-reform-for-better-value-and-medical-innovation/
Weaks, F. G. (2021). Health Care Reform: Exploring Health-Related Quality of Life of HIV/AIDS Patients in Baltimore Post Implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Doctoral dissertation, Morgan State University). https://search.proquest.com/openview/a5096f13b05e554c187890606e246f3f/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y
