Introduction
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, set about reforming the health care system in America so as to enable more people to obtain access to health care. The ACA arrived with a number of strengths and weaknesses. Altogether, the Act affected patients’ access to and quality of health care. It also impacted the cost of health care in the system. This system will discuss the ACA’s strengths and weaknesses while describing its impact on health care in America. It will also provide a discussion of how I would change and improve our current health care system from the standpoint of access, quality and cost.
Strengths and Weaknesses
While the ACA’s biggest supposed strength is the 20 million people who obtained health coverage as a result of the Act, one of the ACA’s main weaknesses is the fact that it has done little to reduce the bureaucratic red tape that causes problems for providers, facilities, and health care workers in various ways. The “competitive grants for regionalized systems for emergency care response” (ACA, 2010, Sec. 1204, 124 STAT., p. 518) that were instituted by the ACA to ensure that federal dollars went to places where they were going to be used most effectively sounds good on paper—but the reality is that Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) that have emerged as a result have placed restrictive conditions on many providers, which in the end harms patients (Alpert, 2013.). EMS workers, for instance, must adhere to new rules that determine where they take patients, as some facilities will not accept them because of ACA and ACO restrictions that stem from the patient’s history and the facilities’ history in treating that patient. So while the 20 million newly covered patients is touted as a strength of the ACA, the reality is that there are conditions that apply. Eckstein (2013) summarizes the problem succinctly when he states that “government-provided health insurance rates of reimbursement do not lend themselves to a successful business model, especially one in which lives are on the line” (p. 2068).
Other strengths of the ACA included its goal of eliminating “lifetime and annual limits on insurance coverage” while ensuring that health care providers would offer patients “preventive services” to help stave off health...
References
ACA. (2010). Sec. 1204, 124 STAT. U.S. Government Publishing Office. Retrieved from https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ148/pdf/PLAW-111publ148.pdf
Alpert, A. et al. (2013). Giving EMS flexibility in transporting low-acuity patients could generate substantial Medicare savings. Health Affairs, 32(12), 2142-2148.
Eckstein, M. (2013). The ambulance industry struggles to go the distance. Health Affairs, 32(12), 2067-2068.
Goldhill, D. (2009). How American health care killed my father. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/
Jacobson-Vann, J.C. (2011). Slipping through the cracks of the breast and cervical cancer prevention and treatment act of 2000- a tragic case of failed access to care. Journal of Nursing Law, 14 (3), 96-106.
Somanader, T. (2016). A look at six years of the affordable care act. Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/03/23/look-six-years-affordable-care-act
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