Health care reform refers to the practice of improving a nation’s healthcare system by changing costs and spending, insurance coverage and benefits, or access to care. Its aim is to improve overall health outcomes for populations while decreasing disparities in health status between populations. Reform attempts date back decades; significant efforts were undertaken under President Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama respectively – with The Affordable Care Act as its latest manifestation.
The Affordable Care Act was intended to bring greater stability and predictability into the individual health insurance marketplace. Some of its key features are:
Preventive Services and Chronic Disease Management
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advises all individuals to undergo preventive screenings on an annual basis to detect any early signs of illness or injury, and to reduce health care costs both individually and collectively. Regular preventive screenings provide valuable early detection opportunities that may prevent more serious problems from developing further, which in turn helps lower health care costs as a whole.
ACA also creates a Patient’s Bill of Rights to safeguard consumers against abuses within the insurance industry, such as denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, imposing lifetime dollar limits on benefits or cancelling coverage because of an accidental mistake in paperwork. Furthermore, annual limits on essential health benefits have been removed; parents can keep their kids on their plans until age 26 without additional cost-sharing requirements and grants are available to states to combat unreasonable health insurance premium increases.
Behavior-Based Healthcare Reform
Behavioral healthcare reforms aim to alter both patient and provider behaviors in ways that affect both their healthcare quality and quantity. Changes could range from anti-smoking campaigns aimed at changing smoking behavior, or offering incentives to doctors who treat their patients with more professionalism and quality care, through to creating incentives for doctors treating their patients with higher standards of professionalism and quality treatment. Whether this type of reform succeeds depends largely on its organization and political will being utilized, with legislation passed swiftly followed by slow implementation within health sector institutions over time.
Health Care System Reform In most developed nations, governments play a prominent role in health insurance provision and policy formation. From setting goals to funding research and development initiatives, government involvement plays a crucial role. While in some nations health insurance is available universally or may be purchased as an individual luxury plan.
The debate around health reform in the US has focused on expanding coverage, decreasing costs and their rates of increase, and improving quality services. Medicare and Medicaid were the initial attempts at reform in this regard; subsequent efforts focused on decreasing insurance costs while increasing access to care. Recent proposals include single payer health care systems as well as pilot projects such as those conducted at CMS to test out new ways of paying medical providers for their services.