Assignment 1 – The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
You are to write a four to six (4-6) page paper and provide responses to the questions posed below.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as health care reform or the Patient's Bill of Rights, was signed into law by President Barack Obama in March 2010. This law has generated much discussion and concern on the part of all stakeholders.
1. Determine how this Federal law will affect market-driven and non-market driven decisions. The market-driven decisions will be affected by What are the results of market-driven health care? First, market-driven health care makes people feel insecure about their prospects for receiving health care when they need it. Second, it destroys the trust that patients once had in their doctors by making doctors "gatekeepers'' whose role is often to block access to care. Third, by making health care a commodity to be bought and sold like any other, it expands the growing economic inequality in the United States to include health inequality. Fourth, it pits health professionals against each other in competing physician groups and hospitals. These are four classic methods of social control: make people feel too insecure to challenge those in power, destroy people's trust in one another, make them more unequal, pit them against each other.
Even before the rise of market-driven health care, corporations relied on the insecurity of health care to control workers. For decades, large employers have preferred to link health benefits to employment, knowing it gave them more control over their employees. According to a New York Times/CBS poll in 1991, 32 percent of workers did not quit jobs they disliked because they were afraid of losing their health benefits.[13] In June, 1998 General Motors threatened to deny medical benefits to striking workers in Flint,