Positive Outcomes
There have been many positive outcomes since the Affordable Care Act went into effect. The one goal of getting health coverage for more Americans has been accomplished by making it more affordable and making health insurance more available. There has been a decline of individuals who have postponed getting medical care due to the cost by one-third. Due to the Medicaid expansion, there has been a decline in collection balances with people who became insured by six to ten hundred dollars (Stoltzfus Jost & Pollack, 2016). Also, there has been an increase in preventative care. More importantly, there have been more services available for the consumer to include coverage for medications, lab tests, dental and vision care for …show more content…
Despite all the publicity in educating the public, many individuals did not have the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions regarding health and their health insurance coverage. Plus, it is found that many find the premiums and cost sharing are still too high for many Americans to afford (Tanner et al., 2016). Plus, there was a large increase in premiums for those that are young, healthy, or those in the individual and small group market that are ineligible for the health reform’s financial health subsidies. Another negative is for those that needed family coverage. An employer’s insurance is adequate and affordable as long as the employee gets coverage for the individual worker not for the entire family. This prevents the family from being eligible for the marketplace tax credits. Some of the children are eligible for coverage under the Children’s Health Insurance Program, but most states have set the qualification to be at two hundred fifty-five percent of poverty or less, which disqualifies great deal of children. Furthermore, there is a penalty for the employers of fifty or more employees that don’t provide coverage, but employers only have to provide very minimal coverage as mentioned above. Plus, the reporting requirements that employers must go through are very difficult. Finally, it has been found that health plans now have higher deductibles and have narrowed their …show more content…
Majority of our health care dollars goes to clinical care and very few go to public health and prevention. This results in not getting good value for our healthcare dollar. Plus, there is an expectation that Ohioans will see a thirteen percent increase in premiums on the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. Those individuals that do not qualify for subsidies will have to pay the full increase in cost. Furthermore, it was found that seventy-nine percent of those that were uninsured in Ohio was because individuals could not afford the premiums, deductibles, copayments or coinsurance. The average individual will find that their deductibles have tripled in the past ten years from five hundred eighty-four dollars to one thousand four hundred and seventy-eight dollars. Another change is that there is a large increase in enrollment into high deductible health plans. This is the result from increase in health care cost and from increased cost sharing. This is to encourage individuals to more cost effective use of their health resources resulting in decrease use of excess utilization, seeking care in proper setting, and improving individual’s healthy choices. In Ohio, sixty-one percent of employees are in the high deductible health plans. Ohio had the fourth largest enrollment in the year 2015 with increase of twenty-seven percent since 2012. To aid individuals with the