Please help Name a public policy that you believe has impacted your health in so
ID: 412246 • Letter: P
Question
Please help
Name a public policy that you believe has impacted your health in some way, and explain HOW it has impacted your life.
For example, you might say that you are more likely to be healthy and safe because we have laws that forbid drunk driving (and then elaborate on that).
As another example, you might say that you are more likely to be healthy and safe because the laws requires doctors to have proper credentials to practice medicine (and, again, please elaborate). Although these examples are only one-sentence in length, your post will need to be longer in order to fully answer both parts of the prompt listed. (need a link)
Explanation / Answer
I think when it comes to the health policies that have impacted my health in some way, I could think of the mandatory policy of healthcare insurance coverage which in way makes my life easier. I do not really have to wait for the last moment when my health indeed takes a toll, to go and get myself treated. My healthcare coverage takes care of my health in particular.
To detail more about this policy, in US, the commitment to develop the healthcare sector in such a way that its benefits reach out to the larger part of the public, is considerably very high. Reforms have been proposed often in the past as well, with regards to the Healthcare sector; however, concretizing the same has at times been a cause of concern. Accordingly, one effective example of a system would be that pertaining to the healthcare system in US.
In the recent times, for establishing an effective system pertaining to the Healthcare, there was an enacting of two federal statutes i.e. Patient’s Protection and Affordable Act (PPACA) in 2010 which was later amended and brought into action with Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. However, apart from these two significant reforms, the rest of the reforms were simply proposed though not yet brought in force. Such reforms include a reduction in fee-for-service and single-payer system reforms. In this regard, various pilot projects have also been implemented to understand the feasibility of these reforms like PPACA conceived an agency called Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation for the same.
The reforms of PPCA were introduced at the time when the Obama Government was in power and hence it is at times referred as the ‘Obamacare’ reforms.
With regards to the interactions within the system as a Public Policy, it is to be noted that the Affordable Care Act affected the healthcare triangle at our facility considerably. These reforms impacted the patients like us in the sense that PPCA would phase-wise introduce a comprehensive system of healthcare insurance in order to help curb with the malpractices undertaken by many health insurance companies in terms of prior existence of condition screening, expensive premiums to buy the policies, cancelation of selling of policies to the public who already has certain illnesses and thereby refusing them to grant the policy, the coverage limitations for the policy holders, etc. This reform also undertook the Risk corridor program under which it targeted to include all those reluctant citizens who were not covered under any of the Health Insurance schemes. As a result of this reform, by 2016, the number of uninsured citizens fell down to approximately half of the total population size which speaks volumes about its success. Further the patients could avail the benefits of the uniformity in premium irrespective to preexisting conditions with regards to the premium brackets for every age group. In order to limit the losses incurred by the insurer as well, a temporary reinsurance program for granting insurance to the insurers as against the unanticipated high claims. To the private insurance companies as well, this reform offers subsidies in the form of reduction in income taxes charged to these insurance players with the view that even the lower economic American class can afford to buy the insurance policies.
Further, with regards the system managed for optimization, in terms of the healthcare facility in our area, there had been some findings that are special worthwhile that are indeed a worthwhile need from the Act: