Affordable Care Act ACA Research Assignment Paper (Essay Sample)

Affordable Care Act ACA
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Introduction
ACA stands for Affordable Care Act. It’s the new reform in healthcare in America and often people call it the Obamacare. The act consists of the following in it; affordable health care for America act, health care and educational reconciliation act, patient protection act and student aid and fiscal responsibility act. It includes also law amendments of public services act and food, drug and cosmetics act. From the time it was signed into law, a lot of amendments have been made with additional regulations and rules, but despite this I have to tried to update this paper with those changes (Blumenthal & Collins, 2014). The ACA places the consumers to be in charge of their health by enabling them to be stable and flexible in making informed choices about their health. The health care is reformed in order for Americans to get health insurance that is of good quality and affordable. It also tries to reduce the spending in healthcare growth in U.S. The reforms include: new rights protection, benefits, insurance companies rules, funding, taxes, spending, tax breaks, new job and committee’s creation and more. This essay paper thus discusses in much further details the ACA overviews, its impact on healthcare access, cost and quality, newly covered people and how it’s achieved.
This overview will enable one to easily get an idea of what ACA is and its impact on an individual. ACA assists the American people by reforming their health care system and in so doing they get access to health insurance that is affordable and of good quality and cut the cost of spending in U.S healthcare. All Americans who have a health insurance will be able to get access to new reforms that they didn’t enjoy their before, that is new benefits, protections and rights. (Cantor et al, 2012). Through this they can get treatment any time and are protected from worse insurance industries and health care abuses. Insurance is made more affordable thus assisting over 32 million Americans who before couldn’t afford health care. Out of pocket and premium costs of many people are reduced and make it affordable to get coverage. The plan is that 95% of all Americans will be insured with time. ACA spreads risks equally to its every insured customer in order to end discrimination. Before people could be discriminated based on gender, race or health status; cost. This is limited by ACA as it requires able Americans to get the minimum essential coverage and maintain it to do so while those that are not able are exempted from it. It sets up new health insurance market place that is new thus providing many Americans with many health plans to compare and contrast in order to select the appropriate one for them, their family, group or organization. ACA stabilizes the budget and economy in a good way by reducing the deficit by over $100 billion in the next ten years. This possible as the overspending, fraud, and abuse and waste of the government are cut short (Blumenthal & Collins, 2014).
A large new patient covered population that is about 30 million in number is expected to gain health care coverage through the Affordable Care Act provisions. About one-third of this newly covered population will move onto Medicaid, nearly a quarter of them will be able to enroll with an employers sponsored plan and about 45% will use the exchanges that is a new online marketplace sponsored by the state so as to purchase insurance (Gruber, 2011). As whole the newly insured covered are of medium age 33 thus are relatively young, single, less educated, poorer and are patients who are ethnically diverse. Their median income as by the federal poverty level is of 166%. The percentage of them that hold at least a bachelor’s degree is about 15% as compared to the already insured people who have 35%. It is significantly less likely that the newly insured covered people have a full employment job that is about 42% as compared to the already insured people, they thus have seasonal jobs or part time employment. About one in every four will be black Americans, Native American, Asian or multi-racial. The newly covered people do relatively report feeling healthy and thus this becomes a worry as many of come for their first check-ups with undetected mental health issues or chronic conditions. Their coverage insurance with the Affordable Care Act provisions will be achieved by the state been able to consider that they are new in the system and that they have never interacted with the insurance system, thus the first things for the state to do is to make them aware about the new coverage and the options of financial assistance (Gruber, 2011). State-run exchanges websites w...