Posted: May 12th, 2015

The Future of Healthcare

The access to health care is a fundamental right to every American citizen whether they are immigrants or Native Americans. The PPACA act was formulated along these principles and extensively deals with issues related to the access of health care for all individuals. This may be through the state run health insurance schemes or through privately sponsored insurance policies.

The patient protection and affordable protection care act was formulated to make fundamental transformations in the medical insurance sector in the United States. This is meant to be achieved through the cost sharing of responsibilities. It is assumed that a systematic review of the insurance market will mitigate the discriminatory vices such as exclusion due to pre-existing conditions. Attaining these reforms without increasing medical insurance premiums suggests that all American should be part of the process and should receive coverage. The Act expands the eligibility bracket of the individuals covered by Medicaid to include persons from low income families which the federal state assuming a bulk of the responsibility of financing this expansion(Jimenez, 08/2009).The Act provides for increased federal funding and expansion of Medicaid and Medicare and also for CHIP improvement. The Act offers new choices for long term services and has modified dual eligibility and tends to improve that quality of healthcare provided by Medicaid. The Act simplifies the enrollment into the Medicaid and CHIP programs, as individuals will be able to join through the government websites.The PPACA Act seeks to establish programs that would promote and encourage workforce education and training and goes further to allocate funding for the expansion of the capacity and capability of primary care services. These initiatives will go a long way in supporting the training of resident medical staff. A major weakness of this Act is the huge cost of financing the bill. The Act places the bulk of responsibility on of financing the program on the federal government which means that the American citizen may have to pay additional taxes to enable the government finance the policy (Goodson, 2010).

A major omission is the requirement of the Act that then federal government should assist the state government incase it fails to establish its own health benefit exchange. In the event that a state is unable or refuses to establish a health care exchange the act stipulates that the federal government should come in to implement an exchanged financed by the federal government. This process would be authorized by the department of health and human services. According to the Act, each state must have an exchange established and functioning by the end of the 1^st of October, 2013. This is in anticipation of the huge enrollment program to be carried out in January of 2014. A federally run exchange might need to run concurrently with existing state governed exchanges. This can potentially cause significant challenges because both the federal and state agents will be formulating, approving benefits and rates which at times may not be congruent with each other. Proponents of the Act claim that the absence of a provision for funding was merely a drafting error; they suggest that they have a written procedure for providing funding. Opponents of the Act claim that the proponents’ arguments have no basis or have little if any significance at all. The funding omissions probably will provide room for another legal battle with the PPACA. Sharp divisions in congress, the approval of spending authorizations to mitigate this omission would probably fail (Goodson, 2010).

There is a greater challenge to the exchange run by the federal government. Although the PPACA stipulates that every state should provider consumers with an exchange, the financing operation for a federally run exchange was not encompassed in the final draft of the PPACA. Within the current go as you pay federal legislative regulations, it is vague on which program financing could be cut, or which taxes may be considered for increase, to finance this potentially important expense. Equally challenging are the subsidies offered to the individuals who are eligible for insurance acquired through the federal run exchange are conspicuously missing from the Act. Even if the financing authority to fund the federal run exchanges was toincorporated into the PPACA Act, an enormous amount of work to construct the federal exchanges still requires to be done in a relative short span of time. The HHS has not provided any guidelines as to when the final regulations governing then establishment of federal run exchanges may be availed to the public.The proponents of the PPACA Act emphasis that when these regulations are published they will be brought to the attention of the public (Gomes, n.d).

I would strongly support this health bill as it has gone a long way to ensure that every American citizen has access to quality and reliable healthcare through Medicaid and CHIP among other programs. Health care in the United States is provided through a pricing system just like other commodities. Individuals may pay for healthcare services by use of private insurance funds or through the public state owned insurance programs. This ensures that all American irrespective of their income status have access to quality health care.