The changing healthcare landscape in the United States as a result of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivek Pande
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
The United States ◽  
Patient Protection

Better Than Nothing: Participant Experiences in Using a County Health Plan

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Rovin ◽  
Rebecca Stone ◽  
Linda Gordon ◽  
Emilia Boffi ◽  
Linda Hunt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Patient Protection ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
History Of ◽  
Better Than

The United States health care system has reached a crisis point, with 49.9 million Americans now living without health insurance (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2011). The United States government has responded to this crisis in a variety of ways, perhaps the most visible being the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in March 2010. With a goal of expanding access to health insurance to 32 million Americans by 2019, the ACA marks an important moment in the history of United States health care reform with the potential to drastically change the United States health insurance landscape (Connors and Gostin 2010). The law delineates only general categories of required benefits and leaves it to each state to decide the specific benefits that will be provided by the insurers in their state (Pear 2011).

Government Intervention in Health Care Markets is Practical, Necessary, and Morally Sound

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Len M. Nichols
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Health Care Markets ◽  
Health Care Market ◽  
The Public ◽  
Patient Protection

The intensity of the opposition to health reform in the United States continues to shock and perplex proponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The emotion (“Abort Obama”) and the apocalyptic rhetoric (“Save our Country, Protect our Liberty, Repeal Obamacare”), render civil and evidence-based debate over the implications and alternatives to specific provisions in the law difficult if not problematic. The public debate has largely barreled down two non-parallel yet non-intersecting paths: opponents focus on their fear of government expansion in the future if PPACA is implemented now, while proponents focus on the urgency and specifics of our health care market problems and the limited number of tools we have to address them. Frustration on both sides has led opponents to deny the seriousness of our health system’s problems and proponents to ignore the risk of governmental overreach. These non-intersecting lines of argument are not moving us closer to a desired and necessary resolution.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Public Health, and the Elusive Target of Human Rights

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lance Gable
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Insurance Coverage ◽  
Health Insurance Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Patient Protection ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Impact

The passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in March 2010 represents a significant turning point in the evolution of health care law and policy in the United States. By establishing a legal infrastructure that seeks to achieve universal health insurance coverage in the United States, the ACA targets some of the major impediments to accessing needed health care for millions of Americans and by extension attempts to strengthen the health system to support key determinants of health. Yet, like many newly passed legislative provisions, the ultimate effects and significance of the ACA remain uncertain. Those charged with implementing the ACA face formidable obstacles — indeed, some of the same obstacles that have been erected to impede other major pieces of social legislation in the past — including entrenched political opposition, constitutional challenges, and what will likely be a prolonged struggle over the content and direction of how the law is implemented. As these debates continue, it is nevertheless important to begin to assess the impact that the ACA has already had on health law in the United States and to consider the likely effects that the law will have on public health going forward.

Interpretative theories as roadmaps to constitutional identity: The case of the United States

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
OR BASSOK
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Patient Protection ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
Constitutional Identity

AbstractAs long as the American Constitution serves as the focal point of American identity, many constitutional interpretative theories also serve as roadmaps to various visions of American constitutional identity. Using the debate over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I expose the identity dimension of various interpretative theories and analyse the differences between the roadmaps offered by them. I argue that according to each of these roadmaps, courts’ authority to review legislation is required in order to protect a certain vision of American constitutional identity even at the price of thwarting Americans’ freedom to pursue their current desires. The conventional framing of interpretative theories as merely techniques to decipher the constitutional text or justifications for the Supreme Court’s countermajoritarian authority to review legislation and the disregard of their identity function is perplexing in view of the centrality of the Constitution to American national identity. I argue that this conventional framing is a result of the current understanding of American constitutional identity in terms of neutrality toward the question of the good. This reading of the Constitution as lacking any form of ideology at its core makes majority preferences the best take of current American identity, leaving constitutional theorists with the mission to justify the Court’s authority to diverge from majority preferences.

The Simple Reality of Our Complex System: The Future of Health Care

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 825-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Mathews Burwell
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care System ◽  
Delivery System ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
The United States ◽  
System Reform ◽  
The Future ◽  
Delivery System Reform

The incredible complexity of the United States health care system can be connected to three simple outcomes: access, affordability, and quality. We should measure our progress against these three measures. While historic progress on access was made through implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the next area of focus for more results across all three measures is delivery system reform.

Catholic Church Advocacy and the Affordable Care Act

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanine Kraybill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Health Care Policy ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The United States ◽  
Universal Health Care ◽  
The Government ◽  
Universal Health

The American Catholic Church has a long history in health care. At the turn of 19th century, Catholic nuns began developing the United States’ first hospital and health care systems, amassing a high level of professionalization and expertise in the field. The bishops also have a well-established record advocating for healthcare, stemming back to 1919 with the Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction, which called for affordable and comprehensive care, particularly for the poor and vulnerable. Moving into the latter part of the 20th century, the bishops continued to push for health care reform. However, in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade (1973), the American bishops insisted that any reform or form of universal health care be consistent with the Church’s teaching against abortion, contraception, and euthanasia. The bishops were also adamant that health care policy respect religious liberty and freedom of conscience. In 1993, these concerns caused the bishops to pull their support for the Clinton Administration’s Health Security Act, since the bill covered abortion as a medical and pregnancy-related service. The debate over health care in the 1990s served as a precursor for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) opposition to the Obama Administration’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) contraception mandate. The ACA also highlighted a divide within the Church on health care among religious leaders. For example, progressive female religious leadership organizations, such as the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and their affiliate NETWORK (a Catholic social justice lobby), took a different position than the bishops and supported the ACA, believing it had enough protections against federally funded abortion. Though some argue this divide lead to institutional scrutiny of the sisters affiliated with the LCWR and NETWORK, both the bishops and the nuns have held common ground on lobbying the government for affordable, comprehensive, and universal health care.

What Is the Affordable Care Act a Case of? Understanding the ACA through the Comparative Method

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-691
Author(s):  
Holly Jarman ◽  
Scott L. Greer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Affordable Care Act ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract International comparisons of US health care are common but mostly focus on comparing its performance to peers or asking why the United States remains so far from universal coverage. Here the authors ask how other comparative research could shed light on the unusual politics and structure of US health care and how the US experience could bring more to international conversations about health care and the welfare state. After introducing the concept of casing—asking what the Affordable Care Act (ACA) might be a case of—the authors discuss different “casings” of the ACA: complex legislation, path dependency, demos-constraining institutions, deep social cleavages, segmentalism, or the persistence of the welfare state. Each of these pictures of the ACA has strong support in the US-focused literature. Each also cases the ACA as part of a different experience shared with other countries, with different implications for how to analyze it and what we can learn from it. The final section discusses the implications for selecting cases that might shed light on the US experience and that make the United States look less exceptional and more tractable as an object of research.

The Ongoing U.S. Health Care Crisis: A Data Update

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
David U. Himmelstein ◽  
Steffie Woolhandler ◽  
Mark Almberg ◽  
Clare Fauke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Health Policy ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Cost Sharing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Health Care Crisis ◽  
Corporate Takeover ◽  
Data Update

While efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act were narrowly defeated, grave problems in health care persist. Twenty-eight million remain uninsured, a number that is likely to increase. Millions more who have coverage cannot afford care because of high cost-sharing requirements. Meanwhile, the corporate takeover of medical care in the United States is at a gallop. This article provides a brief précis of recent data on U.S. health policy.

Are You Covered? Associations Between Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Knowledge and Preventive Reproductive Service Use

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 906-915 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashlee N. Sawyer ◽  
Melissa A. Kwitowski ◽  
Eric G. Benotsch
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Reproductive Health ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Affordable Care Act ◽  
Service Use ◽  
The United States ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Insurance Status ◽  
Patient Protection ◽  
Health Care Legislation

Purpose: Sexual and reproductive health conditions (eg, infections, cancers) represent public health concerns for American women. The present study examined how knowledge of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) relates to receipt of preventive reproductive health services among women. Design: Cross-sectional online survey. Setting: Online questionnaires were completed via Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing website where individuals complete web-based tasks for compensation. Participants: Cisgendered women aged 18 to 44 years (N = 1083) from across the United States. Measures: Participants completed online questionnaires assessing demographics, insurance status, preventive service use, and knowledge of PPACA provisions. Analysis: Chi-squares showed that receipt of well-woman, pelvic, and breast examinations, as well as pap smears, was related to insurance coverage, with those not having coverage at all during the previous year having significantly lower rates of use. Hierarchical logistic regressions determined the independent relationship between PPACA knowledge and use of health services after controlling for demographic factors and insurance status. Results: Knowledge of PPACA provisions was associated with receiving well-woman, pelvic, and breast examinations, human papillomavirus vaccination, and sexually transmitted infections testing, after controlling for these factors. Results indicate that expanding knowledge about health-care legislation may be beneficial in increasing preventive reproductive health service use among women. Conclusion: Current findings provide support for increasing resources for outreach and education of the general population about the provisions and benefits of health-care legislation, as well as personal health coverage plans.

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