The Current Affairs And Trends In The Health Sector (Essay Sample)

Current Events in Health Policy
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Introduction
Healthcare policies are the legislations or laws that have been put in place to ensure that both health practitioners and patients have access to quality healthcare facilities for healthy living. In the recent days, governments, insurance companies, hospitals, families and all other stakeholders have each contributed to the well-being of the health sector. Governments are now striving to build more hospitals and health institutes to train more health professionals so as to improve the health infrastructures. This paper will therefore establish these new trends in the health sector policy making and how they have individually contributed to the wellbeing of the society at large.
Current Events in Health Policy
Manchikanti, L., & Hirsch, J. A. (2011) described the Obamacare (2010) also known as the Patient Protection and affordable care Act (PPACA) is one of the recent policies in the health sector. This is a United states federal statute that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in the year 2010. This has been presented as the most significant policy ever implemented in the history of the US health sector.
(Jones et al., 2014) stated that the act has led to the reduction of the number of uninsured persons. This also led the significant drop in healthcare cost among the low income earners. This policy offered an opportunity for the individuals and small business to purchase insurance plans. It targets those individuals of incomes between the 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level. However, in this policy, some people will still remain uninsured. These include the illegal immigrants, those eligible citizens not enrolled in Medicaid, the citizens are willing to pay the annual penalties than subscribing to the plans and those whose insurance coverage are costly compared to their specific household income and are therefore exempted from paying the penalties.
The Commonwealth Report (2014) indicates that there is an additional 9.5 million adults that had obtained the health insurance. The Obamacare has therefore offered an opportunity for the poor citizens to access quality medical care. Private insurance companies have also come up with health based plans to cover families from ill hill health. They offer competitive packages to affording citizens. However, most citizens prefer public insurance plans due to convenience and affordability. In most cases, private insurance brokers are quite expensive in most countries therefore not preferred.
In the recent times, there has been a great deal of information with regard to public awareness. Both private and public health services have been made very accessible. There is significant emergence of social media platforms to advance the awareness programs. Most health providers are now available for consultations on their websites which is cost effective and accessible. This has been achieved through the Millennium Development Goals that have seen the global world outsourcing medical services to private providers. For instance, third world countries that may not be able to achieve some curative measures in terminal diseases usu...