How to Achieve Affordable Healthcare in America (Research Paper Sample)

How to Achieve Affordable Healthcare in America
Name
Institution Making Healthcare Affordable in America
Soaring healthcare costs can have adverse effects on families, such as missing on vital healthcare services and going bankrupt. Providing affordable healthcare, therefore, will be an important achievement in protecting poor families from the negative effects of rising healthcare costs.
Considering that majority of Americans (86 percent) have healthcare insurance (Tooker, 2003), the first and foremost step for promoting affordable healthcare is ensuring that their coverage is sufficient to protect them in the event of serious health conditions. Towards this goal, I will propose policies that will set the minimum insurance premiums that employers should remit for their employees’ healthcare coverage. Secondly, recognizing that such a move will translate into more expenses for employers, I will initiate tax incentives as a way of subsidizing insurance premiums and enabling businesses and insurance providers to offer affordable, quality coverage options (Lathrop & Hodnick, 2014). Thirdly, I will support the expansion of government programs that provide care to lower and middle class Americans to make healthcare more affordable to the people who need it most (Lathrop & Hodnick, 2014). For instance, the government can increase the number of primary care givers such as community health centres and clinics.
Fourth, the informal sector employs a significant number of people from lower class families (Williams, McClellan, & Rivlin, 2010, p. 1482). Accordingly, I will help small businesses through preferential taxes and subsidies to enable them protect their workers from increasing living and healthcare costs. Fifth, is also necessary to recognize the demographic, cultural, ethnic, and medical needs diversity of the American population (Tooker, 2003, p. 107). In this regard, I will give states the freedom and flexibility to develop healthcare programs relevant to their local problems. For instance, rural states like Arkansas have a high number of aging patients whose needs are different from those of young adults in metropolitan states like New York.
To conclude, implementing effective policies will help in making healthcare more affordable in America. Such policies include increasing the minimum insurance premiums paid by employers, tax reductions and subsidies for employers and insurance providers, expanding government programs providing primary care services, helping small businesses to protect their workers, an...