Propensity Score Matching

“The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Implications for Public Health Policy and Practice.” Public Health Reports. Association of Schools of Public Health. n.d. Web. 14 July 2015. This paper claims that the PPACA will cut the number of uninsured Americans in half. The act attempts to provide nearly universal coverage and improve the quality and equity of said coverage through reforms to insurance standards and the marketplace. It also attempts to improve the quality of healthcare and the efficiency of its delivery by allowing consumers to edge the system into a more integrated state and measuring performance. It attempts to encourage preventive medicine by targeting chronic illnesses and funding community-based medicine. These changes will bring huge opportunities for improvement in the system, many of which are subtle and nuanced and will only be seen as the plan rolls into act over the next few

Unlike the middle and poor classes, higher income earners are expected to pay greater sums of money as taxpayers to cover the expenses of treating poorer people. The number of services provided based on this increased payment is greater than what those covered previously received, though the services do not always meet the needs of the persons insured and rarely corresponds directly to the payment made by wealthier taxpayers. For example, the premium for people who are considered living beyond the poverty line is no more than 9.5% of their monthly income (Dunn 70).

Health insurance in the United States is a highly politicized issue. In recent years, many strides have been made to extend health insurance coverage to all Americans with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). While the program has been vigorously debated in the public realm, arguments are often centered around political ideology rather than economic theory. This paper seeks to challenge the entire structure of the current health insurance model, since its inception in the 1950s. Through the overuse of a third-party payer model, a magnitude of problems have emerged that severely diminish the efficiency of health care allocation in the United States. This paper proposes a model that seeks to correct issues of cost, access, and market efficiency by adapting the Medicare Part D payment scheme for an all encompassing insurance model.

I was the conductor and subject of this study, which took place over a two week time period. I had collected my baseline data for five days from November 9th to the 13th. Then, I collected my intervention data for seven days between November 15th and 21st. The basic procedure I used during the collection of both of these data was, I set up timers on my phone in eight intervals of two hours throughout the day from 7am to 11pm each day. The timers were set ten minutes into each interval. For my baseline data, if I remembered to drink water before the timer went off, I would record my result as “Didn’t go off” on my data sheet. If however the timer went off before I remembered to drink

Such data suggests that rural areas were actually better off in terms of medical care prior to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act than they are now. Before ACA implementation, the rural population was significantly more likely to be covered by Medicaid (21%) or other public insurance (4%) than the metropolitan population (16% and 3%, respectively). Therefore, while urban individuals on average had more healthcare benefits due to the nature of their insurance provider, since Medicaid made up some of the gap in employer-sponsored coverage in rural areas, the uninsured rate was similar in rural and urbans populations prior to the ACA (Figure 2).

In 2010, the President of the United States signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) into law (Luther & Hart, 2014). As written, the PPACA will be the most extensive change in the financing and provision of healthcare in 50 years (Luther & Hart, 2014). The stated purposes of the legislation are to decrease the number of medically uninsured people as well as decrease the cost of insurance and healthcare for those already insured (Shi & Singh, 2015). Medicaid expansion is significant element of the PPACA and is designed to provide health insurance to the lower income population (Vincent & Reed, 2014). The purpose of this paper

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.

In 2010 the American government passed new health care legislation, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), in order to reform the United States health care system. This health care reform opens the door for some Americans who have never been eligible for affordable health care insurance to obtain it beginning in 2014 (Sparer, 2011). All the states will enact this legislation but some will limit the provision provided to their citizens (Kaiser Commission, 2013). North Carolina is one of the states that have chosen not to enact all of the ACA’s provisions (Kaiser Commission, 2013). In this paper, I will look at health care

As health care reform in the United States makes drastic changes in insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act, San Francisco developed Healthy San Francisco in 2007, a safety net program aimed to help transition the low income and uninsured Americans as they qualify for various health insurance programs (Katz & Brigham, 2011). Healthy San Francisco is a program only for the uninsured adult citizens within the county limits. Under the program, individuals and families can choose primary care homes and defined specialty care networks, with transparent pricing based on income level (Katz & Brigham, 2011). Children under the age of 18 do not qualify for Healthy San Francisco as they would otherwise qualify for another county run program for children who do not qualify for state or federal health insurance (Katz & Brigham, 2011). As part of the program, a health information program would analyze applicants

After reviewing the lecture, I believe that the PPACA will significantly affect Health Disparities in the United States. Based on the readings, the features for this plan include giving incentive to business owners to provide insurance coverage to their workers whether If by penalty if there are over 50 employees or by providing tax credit to those with less. The health system focused on collecting enhanced data based on race, ethnicity, sex, primarily language, and disability status to look for information to improve health care. The main goals of the PPACA is to expand coverage, control costs, and improve the health care delivery system. It reduces disparities in multiple ways. For example, for African Americans they are more likely

In the United States, there is an inequitable distribution of power, money, and resources that create health disparities among the different socioeconomic classes (WHO, 2014). The PPACA was created to affect the social determinants of health through the Expansion of Medicaid via the PPACA. An example of health disparities can be seen with life expectancy across the difference levels of social economical levels. In the United States, the upper class individuals live on average 20 years longer than those in the poorer classes (Marmot, 2005).

This program would cut about 43 percent or equivalent to 40,000 enrollment participants’ slots. The program, at the time, housed or serviced 104,000 enrollees and after the reduction it would bring that number down to 64,000 enrolled (Renz, 2011). The reason this was a more serious issue for administrators to resolve, was the demographics of the participants; Low Income Families. Families that are, at the time, in a disadvantage state and needed means to provide for basic necessities when it came to health coverage.

The implementation of the healthcare reform to the people throughout the United States provides healthcare coverage to all Americans increasing the accessibility to quality healthcare coverage making it more affordable for families. Throughout this paper I will discuss how effective the healthcare reform has been for the state of Pennsylvania, describing what the positive and negative outcomes are, and how the it has impacted the community health within my state. I will further discuss what effects the health care reform has had on economics in health care within my state.

The evaluation criteria to determine the effectiveness of this policy must include a variety of facets. First, there is the obvious quantitative evaluation method in determining how many Americans are uninsured or under-insured after the plan is fully implemented. It is estimated that the policy will provide coverage to more than 94% of Americans (“The Patient Protection”, n.d.). Although serving these Americans is a primary goal of the Act, whether or not all of the people will be served is yet to be seen and will need to be monitored. In addition, the quality and efficacy of healthcare is another primary concern of this policy.

Position for the patient that will lead to the worst ventilation-perfusion matching is lying supine with no pillows. This position will causes significant reduction in lung volumes and flow rates which increases work required for breathing. Without a pillow to prop the patients head up leads to further restriction of the airway and an increased the risk for hyperventilation. Standing up straight is also detrimental because of gravity acting on the overproduction of mucous, causing it to drain into parts of the lungs making it even more difficult to expel. The best position for R.S. when sleeping is sitting up straight at a at least a ninety degree angle. But even that is a hassle as it's not always comfortable. He may prefer to sleep on his