¶ … Affordable Care Act working?," which was written by Margot Sanger-Katz and was published in the New York Times. The article takes a look at whether the Affordable Care Act, which came into effect a year ago, has had the desired impacts. The author breaks down the objectives of the act into different categories: number of uninsured, insurance affordability, health outcomes, online exchanges, the state of the healthcare industry, expansion of Medicare and the overall level of health spending in America.
The article is discussing the Affordable Care Act. Most of the provisions of the Act have now come into place, so the article takes a look at the statistics in an attempt to gauge whether or not the Act has had the desired outcomes, or if it is making progress. The Affordable Care Act is a comprehensive package of policies that affect most aspects of the health care system, especially with respect to insurance and patient care. The article itself is also aimed at taking a look at the different aspects of the ACA, in order to determine whether or not it has been successful. So most of the outcomes are analyzed from the perspective of the customer -- certainly it is the customer/patient/end user who cares most about having insurance,...
The other components of the article are either industry-centric (health of the industry, expansion of Medicare) or government-centric (overall level of
healthcare costs in America). So there are a few different stakeholders discussed, but the
audience for the New York Times is consumers, not
politicians or the industry, though they may read it as well. Ultimately, the interest of the consumer is the most important facet of the article.
The article seeks to
outline the
performance, so basically measuring the policy with respect to its ability to deliver on the expected benefits. For example, the ACA was supposed to, in a few different ways, contribute to better bargaining power on the part of payers, which would theoretically lower the total cost of the health care system. The author identifies that the trend in health care costs has been going downward -- at least the growth rate has slowed, so that one year of the ACA cannot be credited with the decline in the growth rate last year either. That said, it is still expected that the ACA will contribute to a long-run decrease in
healthcare costs, just that one year is not enough to see the effects of that policy.
For employers, the ACA was expected to increase complexity during the implementation phase, as any major new
law would…
