Current and Future Health Policies Affecting Health Care Costs, and Quality

Since the signing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by Obama in 2010, there has been a drastic improvement in the number of people enrolling for insurance cover thus making quality healthcare more accessible even to the poor. Although the law has enabled the increased insured people even with long-term health conditions at relatively low premiums, the act is still unpopular among Americans. ACA prohibited insurance providers from raising their premiums and also forced them to ensure that it accounted for the low-income population. The move was to ensure that the quality health care was accessible and affordable for every American.

Although implementation of ACA in the first three years led to a reduction of health expenses, it has started to increase, and there are worries the cost increment rate are higher than the economic growth thus becoming more of a liability to the government and taxpayers (Abrams et al., 2015). The increase in costs calls for reformed that will improve healthcare while ensuring healthcare costs are constant and affordable. There are calls for changes mainly on the issue of insurance providers being allowed to adjust the premiums as the current rules are crippling the businesses. The ACA’s aim to ensure lower costs and quality or value-oriented healthcare has made hospitals operate under financial constraints and led to increased working hours of health providers leading to depreciation of quality (Abrams et al., 2015).

The future projected changes on ACA is aimed at allowing the market demand and supply to determine the premium price but such a reform would lead to more people becoming uninsured. The most applicable move is to increase the fines for young healthy adults who forego insurance cover as it is cheaper at the moment to pay the fine than paying the premiums. It would be unethical to increase the premiums to levels that most of the low and middle-income earners would not be able to pay thus an expansive model of insurance cover should be implemented. The model entails government, and the insurance providers operate together to ensure that all the citizens are insured at the lowest possible premiums with the Medicaid for those living below the poverty level enabling them to acquire insurance cover.(Abrams et al., 2015) The states and the federal government should also employ more health professionals to help change the value based type of treatment to patient-oriented healthcare services (Abrams et al., 2015). The success of implementing the policy changes will be built on the collaboration of all the major stakes holders, for instance, the federal and states government, health professionals, the insurance providers, and patients with the goals being to improve healthcare quality at affordable costs.

Reference

Abrams, M., Nuzum, R., Zezza, M., Ryan, J., Kiszla, J., &Guterman, S. (2015). The Affordable Care Act's Payment and Delivery System Reforms: A Progress Report at Five Years . Commonwealthfund.org . Retrieved 6 May 2017, from, http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/may/aca-payment-and-delivery-system-reforms-at-5-years