Health Care Reform: A Necessary Evil Essay

Imagine paying $500, $600, $700, or $1,000 monthly for health care insurance only to realize these payments were for naught. The health care insurance provider that received these monthly installments has decided whatever is ailing you will not be covered due to a pre-existing medical condition. What if you couldn’t have the luxury of health care insurance at all due to the basis the health care insurance provider has concluded you have a pre-existing medical condition? These are the dilemmas facing millions of Americans

insurance due to unemployment. There are also a lot of uninsured Americans that are employed, however the cost of health insurance keeps rising and many families are opting not to have the insurance so that the bills can still be paid. Lack of insurance has had the greatest effect on thousands of Americans who suffer from chronic diseases. These Americans are now unable to go to the doctor on a regular basis and keep up with their daily medicines that are necessary in

Health insurance comes as second nature to many of us. We grab that blue and white card and put it in our wallet and forget about it until we are sick or injured. When this happens, there it is, cushioning our fall like the extra padding it provided to cushion our wallets. This is not the case with everyone, however. Many Americans have no cushion to fall back on, no blue and white card to show the emergency room when they have an unexpected health concern. No HMO with a convenient co-pay amount when their son or daughter develops an ear infection.

It is estimated there are between 20,000 and 45,000 deaths a year due to lack of health insurance. “The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured…”, Andrew Wilper, M.D. Isn’t that sad? There shouldn’t be long hours of waiting before a patient can be treated just because he or she is uninsured. If it is an urgent matter, then we all should get equal treatment, don’t you

Findings from Squires and Blumenthal (2016) showed that only 8.9 percent of Americans are now uninsured, and since the Affordable Care Act went into effect in 2010 there are 20 million more Americans who now have health insurance and access to affordable care.

A powerful force for change can be created by embracing transparency. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, “transparency is a broad-scale initiative enabling consumers to compare quality and the price of health care services so they can make their own informative choices among doctors and hospitals. This initiative is laying the foundation for pooling and analyzing information about procedures, hospitals and physicians services. In order to create value driven health care, there are four steps to turn raw data into

The latest health care reform has done what few policies manage to do – sicken both republicans and progressive democrats. While we can all agree that a reform of the health care system is sorely needed, we must also acknowledge that “Obamacare” is not the cure-all we so desperately require. Rather, President Obama, like a medieval barber, prescribed a health care reform that treated the symptoms of our flawed system rather than the actual disease. The subsidization of health insurance providers has proven ineffective at providing affordable coverage for all. Certainly one is likely to hear the various incendiary talking points of both the proponents and opponents. Whether it’s the republican candidates blaspheming Obamacare as socialism, or the administration praising the success of health care for all, it is difficult to actually find constructive dialogue. We are purview to many sound bites, but few actual solutions. We have witnessed heated debates, but rarely do we witness intelligent discourse. If beneficial reform is to be crafted and implemented, we must first acknowledge the issues and inconsistencies of the current system and begin to explore alternate methods of providing health care to the American people.

“According to the report, titled Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010, 49.9 million Americans or 16.3 percent of the total US population had no health insurance in 2010. That percentage represents a slight increase on 2009’s figures, when 49 million citizens or 16.1 percent of the population was uninsured” (Gamser, 2011).

The Affordable Care Act was into law March 2010. The law has planned to make wide-range of changes to healthcare in the United States. The Affordable Care Act efforts to offer universal right to use to healthcare for Americans, control the rising costs of healthcare, adjust the private insurance industry complete things like state-based private exchanges and online marketplace that brings together state-approved insurance plans from multiple companies so consumers can shop for individual insurance plans, improve the quality of healthcare and make healthcare choices more consumer friendly and easier to understand (Medical Mutual,2017). Healthcare reform involves nearly all Americans from old or young,

Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, there has been a continuous debate about the effects it will have on the United States economy. Many people argue that expanding insurance coverage for all people will create crippling cost burdens for the economy and taxpayers. While others believe that the ACA will in fact give the economy a much-needed boost. In 2006 as a measure to improve overall healthcare, the state of Massachusetts implemented the Health Care Insurance Reform Act. This paper looks at the positive and negative effects of the Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Act (MHRA). Using a literature review of public health studies ranging from 2009-2012, I argue that there are both positive and negative effects of the Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform. While the Massachusetts Reform increased health insurance coverage for all citizens and decreased the number of uninsured citizens accessing emergency rooms, it also did very little to decrease already existing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities among minorities and whites in the state of Massachusetts. Understanding the Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Act may help in the goal of trying to achieve near-universal healthcare. This paper provides an understanding of the missing pieces in the Massachusetts Health Care Insurance Reform Act and constitutes a starting place from which to understand the Affordable Care Act.

The rising cost of health care has led companies to stop offering health insurance for employees, and private insurance is often too expensive for people to afford. Many families make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but are unable to pay for private health insurance. Health care costs in the United States have more than doubled in the last twenty years. Insurance premiums are rising five times faster than wages, and Americans are spending more money on health care than people in any other country. The average amount one person pays per year for health care in the United States is 134 times higher than the average of other industrialized countries (“Health Care Issues”). Even people who have insurance aren’t guaranteed coverage. Many insurance companies find loopholes to avoid paying for expensive medical treatment, leaving people with massive debt from medical bills. Medical bills and illness cause over half of all personal bankruptcies in the United

For the first time in history, insurance companies will no longer be allowed to simply tell a person “no”. They will be required to offer coverage and accommodate regardless of a person’s health status, and they will not be able to jack up rates or drop any one from coverage when the main person in the insurance packet gets sick.

Consequently the U.S. spends more money than any other country on health care, and the medical care that is being provided may be compromised. Research has shown that the lack of health care insurance compromises a person’s health. However, there continues to be unnecessary death every year in the U.S. due to lack of health care

The proposed health care reform bill attempts to change issues of public policy and health care management for the poor and uninsured. Many leaders from the Democratic Party are actively engaging in policy-making to fix what Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California) calls a “‘dysfunctional’ health care system” (2009). Currently, the U.S. health care system denies people with pre-existing conditions from receiving care. Another problem with the system is that the health insurance that some employers offer may be so expensive that their employees cannot afford it. Any cuts in Medicaid may mean that physicians have fewer incentives to provide adequate care for the poor. These are some of the many problems that the Affordable Health Choices Act attempts to address. Fiscally conservative political and business groups oppose this measure because they believe that any changes in public policy and health care management might affect them negatively.

I. More than 43 million Americans reported being uninsured throughout 2002 and millions more lack coverage for shorter periods. The lack of insurance negatively affects not only the uninsured, but their families, the communities in which they live, and the country as a whole (The Institute of Medicine).