The article, “ How the Senate’s health-care bill threatens the nation’s health ,” Atul Gawande tries to understand the impact of the Senate Republicans’ health-care bill on the actual health of the people (Gawande, 2017). According to him, he believes that incremental care which is a regular and ongoing care rather than to the emergency care is one of the core sources of modern medicine’s value. Based on this, Gawande believes that those individuals who will access adequate incremental care have a higher chance to access better prevention, early disease diagnosis in addition to efficient management of most critical conditions (Gawande, 2017). In addition to this, it will facilitate better chronic illnesses control and longer life span among people. The current health care reform proposal will negatively affect the health of the nation because it will eliminate the current Medicaid and the A.C.A exchanges that majority of the American rely on for their well-being.
With the implementation of the proposed health care reform, few people would be in a position to get a medical insurance cover, and this would mean that they might not get more of the critical incremental care as was the case with the introduction of the Affordable Care Act. According to Gawande (2017), insurance coverage plays a vital role regarding increasing the number of individuals who might be able to access the regular care and at the same time afford the type of care that they might demand. Lack of health insurance coverage would thus mean that people might not get the chronic-illness care, primary and the preventive care or even the required medication.
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The conservatives have taken a narrow view of the significance of the health insurance where they only focus on the specific catastrophic events like emergencies or sudden high costs diseases. The majority of the Americans accumulate costly chronic health issues when they age; therefore, the bill would mean lack of a good health care that might not help to delay, manage or control chronic health concerns. According to Gawande (2017), Medicaid has done a great job to the Americans regarding improving access to care and mortality reduction compared to any private coverage; therefore, the implementation of the bill would mean disaster to the Americans.
The Senate reform bill would affect the nation’s health by terminating the coverage for the millions of the Americans who depend on the Medicaid or the A.C.A exchanges. Gawande considers such bills as Medicaid-repeal bills which seem to imitate the Obamacare-repeal bill which is not the case (Gawande, 2017). Medicaid has been working efficiently providing coverage for more than 60% of the disabled children in addition to maternity coverage for half of the pregnant women. Rather than enabling the majority of the people to access healthcare, the Senate bill would deny them this opportunity hence creating a condition where low-income earners might not access incremental care.
The Senate bill that has been proposed would make individuals who purchase the insurance on the A.C.A exchange comprising of those people without any care coverage from their employers or the Medicaid spend more money for worse forms of coverage as they get older (Gawande, 2017). The plan on the exchange would only cover about half of the medical costs while at the same time cost sharing subsidies that were meant for the working class citizens would also be eliminated and the tax credit level available to them cut. As a result of this, Gawande believes that the median deductible would rise rapidly from $500 to $6000. Further, the annual premium of the aged earning $50, 000 would triple to $14,000 in Athens, Ohio all pointing to a much worse care condition in the nation where the citizens could not access regular care (Gawande, 2017).
In conclusion, it is clear that the bill tends to promise terrible coverage for the citizens at an unaffordable price and this might force people to give up the insurance hence leaving them without the primary protection hence threatening individual insurance market. Additionally, the proposed bill might put the health care institutions into a greater financial trouble and for the American patients; it would mean increased medical debt and deaths.
References
Gawande, A. (2017, June 26). How the Senate’s health-care bill threatens the nation’s health. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-senates-health-care-bill-threatens- nations-health
