Affordable Care Act Pros And Cons

An essay on the Affordable Care Act
The author wished to remain anonymous.

The Affordable Care Blunder
Abstract
The new healthcare bill in the United States, called the Affordable Care Act, has changed American healthcare for the worse. There are three main groups besides politicians and the public who are most affected by this bill. There are associations like the American Medical Association who are concerned with the wide ranging global and national effects of the bill. There are individual professionals who are concerned what the bill will mean for their profession. And there are the insurance companies who are having difficulties incorporating the bill. Some of the problems with the bill include, but are not limited to, hospital/doctor
reimbursement for patients who do not pay, lack of incentive for doctors to specialize, and the insurance companies’ issues with implementing the new stipulations. While the Affordable Care Act is supposed to alleviate for the poor by providing them with healthcare plans they would otherwise not have access to, the Act leaves too many problems unsolved to be considered a good thing for the United States.

Affordable Care Blunder
The dream is health coverage for everyone in the United States. It will not matter if you are rich or poor, sick or well. Congress recently passed a bill that reaches for this goal. The bill is called the Affordable Care Act. The new healthcare bill, hereafter called the ACA, has changed healthcare in the United States forever, but not for the better. There are three points of view on the new Act: global-professional, individual-professional, and the view on insurance. Each of these views has both good and bad things to say about the new Act, but the negatives outweigh the positive.
According to the global professional point of view the Affordable Care Act is going to create more problems than it solves. The beginning of these problems is that people are so focused on the provision of healthcare insurance for everyone, they forget about the healthcare workforce. In the article by Brenda Cleary from the American Medical Association, she highlights this issue, “There has been a great deal of attention on the expansion of health insurance to 32 million Americans and on the mandate to require individual Americans to have some form of health insurance by 2014 and less on other provisions, including those on the healthcare workforce” (Cleary). This lack of provision for the healthcare workforce has the potential to create more problems than the ACA solves.
Another huge issue with implementing a national healthcare standard is that while it provides a direction for provision of healthcare to the people, there is no model for how healthcare providers will be compensated for non-payment. Even in our current healthcare system healthcare providers have no way to recoup funds from patients who refuse to pay. The only way the providers can recoup these losses is to charge paying patients more. How then are they to recoup costs of those who do not pay without charging those who do? Will the government provide compensation? If it does, how is this better than what occurs now? Either paying patients pay for those who refuse to pay through high prices for medical services or they pay through tax dollars. Not only that, but even when patients do pay through the Medicare system, doctors are only receiving 79 percent of what they would normally get for their services (Robeznieks). The other problem with this is that because of the payment cut, patients on Medicare will be limited in who they can choose to see for their healthcare needs. Not every physician is going to be open to a 21 percent pay cut (Robeznieks). Although it is necessary to eliminate duplicate or harmful treatments to patients, which the ACA will do, the ACA also calls for provider pay reductions in an effort to “promote… more efficient providers” (Hayes). Do people really work more efficiently when you reduce their pay?
One of the benefits of the ACA on the healthcare workforce, however, is that it establishes a national commission for ensuring that there are adequate numbers of healthcare workers and that those workers have the right skills sets. This action has been sorely needed for a very long time. Another provision of the ACA provides for programs that should reduce hospital acquired illnesses and infections and reduce readmission rates. Although the ACA requires these programs to be in place, it is not responsible for their creation; many programs with these goals in mind are already in practice in many hospitals and private practices (Cleary). Elsewhere in the world, countries have already turned to government mandated healthcare systems. This is one of the few arguments in the Affordable Care Act’s favor. Canada and Great Britain are examples of countries with government run healthcare. In these countries everyone has access to healthcare. Everyone has access to medication. The only downside of their systems is that the wait lists for surgeries can be long and dental care is not always the best. The real problem behind this is not that they have government run systems, but that these systems are underfunded (Light). But how does that help provide a model for U.S. healthcare? Another issue is that the ACA is mired in politics. Before the ACA was passed, it was first a bipartisan venture which dissolved into a grapple between Republicans and Democrats. The politicians also left out and ignored the advice of medical professionals, people who know our current system inside and out and who have good ideas for improving it (Robeznieks). Members of Congress finally agreed on a slimmer, less costly version which is the ACA as it stands today (Hayes). Unfortunately there is also some debate as to the constitutionality of the bill. That issue will be tried in courts for years to come (Hayes). From the individual professional point of view the ACA causes nothing but problems.
The first of many is that, again, there is no method in place for the healthcare provider to recover costs incurred by patients who do not pay. People do not often recognize or remember that liability insurance, the insurance a doctor needs in case of a malpractice suit, is extremely expensive. Carol Rice feels that because many patients do not pay and there is currently no good method of recoupment in place, there is a strong potential to put hospitals and doctors in private practice out of business. Furthermore, the ACA does not improve or fix the current methods of recoupment
(Rice). Ms. Rice also believes this lack of recovering costs forces healthcare workers to do more with less. A microbiology lab, for instance, has to buy supplies to culture samples, sterilize equipment, and test said samples. If they are not paid enough for their services then shortcuts will be made. And where there are shortcuts in medicine, mistakes are made and people get hurt or die (Rice). In a socialist healthcare system, everyone tends to get paid the same regardless of hard work or specialty. For a doctor, the bills for going to medical school are very expensive, but if a doctor wants to specialize… say in cardiology, the school expense just gets higher. So if a neurosurgeon starts getting paid the same amount of money that a family practice doctor gets, then no one is going to want to be a neurosurgeon anymore. Obviously our society cannot do without specialties (Rice). One of the largest changes to healthcare through the ACA is that everyone must have insurance.
This is the largest positive factor of the ACA. A change that people do not talk about is that insurance companies will have to change their policies. The ACA is meant to target insurance policies that have limitations based on pre-existing conditions. The goal is to eliminate this kind of policy (Hayes). This inevitably costs money. A lot of private insurance companies cannot afford to implement these changes without some kind of monetary aid. In U.S. society that means that, more than likely, the government will step in to “bail” them out. Also, low income families will be given tax credits and incentives for purchasing insurance. This in turn means more taxpayer dollars are needed and will be spent
(Hayes). Another problem with insurance companies is that they will always find ways around the laws and some of the laws can be interpreted loosely. Future Congresses will also have oversight of the new ACA and will be able to change it. This eventuality is almost a guarantee (Hayes). There are many different views of the ACA: the global-professional, the individual-professional, and the insurance view. While there are definitely some positives within the Affordable Care Act, the disadvantages are far more numerous. Only time will tell if the ACA is truly a good thing for the U.S. or not.

Works Cited
Cleary, Brenda, and Peggy Wilmoth. "The Affordable Care Act -- what it means for the future of nursing." Tar Heel Nurse 73.2 (2011): 8. CINAHL Plus with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 19 July 2011.
Hayes, Katherine. "OVERVIEW OF POLICY, PROCEDURE, AND LEGISLATIVE HISTORY THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT." NAELA Journal 7.1 (2011): 1-9. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 19 July 2011.
Light, Donald W. American Public Health Association. 10 August 2002. 1 August 2011
.
Rice, Carol. Personal Interview. 27 June 2011.
Robeznieks, Andis. "Reform repercussions." Modern Healthcare 40.25 (2010): 16. Consumer Health Complete. EBSCO. Web. 19 July 2011.