Healt Care Reforms & Affordable Care Act Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Healt Care Reforms & Affordable Care Act - Essay Example Also this paper tries to compare Canadian & US health care systems. Health Care Reforms & Affordable Care Act The Affordable Care Act puts in place strong consumer protections, provides new coverage options and gives you the tools you need to make informed choices about the health. This act aims at providing affordable health care to individuals & families by reducing the premium costs, capping out-of-pocket expenses and providing tax relief for businesses. Also, for those who didn’t have insurance cover earlier, would be able choose a convenient plan for them. The ‘insurance exchange ‘intends to provide buying power by offering affordable choices of private insurance plans. Also small businesses will get new tax credit to help offset the cost of covering their employees (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services) Conditions that led to the introduction of the bill In US, increasing health care costs in the last few years have has been a great economic burden on i ndividuals, organizations and also fort the government. There has been a steady increase in the proportion of individuals without a health insurance cover. The recent estimate from the Census Bureau indicates that more than 46 million were uninsured in 2008 (Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers).Increase in healthcare costs and spending on health care has been consistently increase at a higher rate than the growth in GDP. Recent projections suggest that total spending in the U.S. health care sector exceeded $2.5 trillion in 2009, representing 17.6 % of GDP. (Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers) For organizations, healthcare cost is a main component in employee total remuneration and steady incline in the health care costs has started showing its effects on their base salary. This is because organizations provide wages and benefits; such increasing health care costs tend to reduce the proportionate increases in salary. The steady growth in health care spending has placed a n increasingly heavy financial burden on individuals and families. Governments & Local authorities are also struggling with this upward movement spending on health care. Spending on the means-tested Medicaid program now the second largest category of outlays in their budgets, just behind elementary and secondary education. (Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers) Economic Effects of the bill Healthcare reforms bill has various provisions like guaranteed issue and partial community rating. These provisions would help the applicants with similar demographics to obtain the same premium from the insurers without regard to many of the pre-existing medical conditions. Under this bill, all individuals and families with incomes up to 133% of the poverty level are eligible for Medicaid facility and Low income persons and families above the Medicaid level and up to 400% of the federal poverty level will be provided with Federal subsidies. Small business that doesn’t offer health cov erage to their employees will also share the responsibility healthcare spending. Also co-sharing & deductibles are to be eliminated for select insurance benefits in the "essential benefits package" like for Level A or Level B preventive care (Wikipedia) Affordable care act provides for deduction on Medicare tax on Individual or Family income over $200- 250K and this becomes a major source of revenue for the healthcare reforms. Also insurance