Health Care Reforms

The health care system is the most crucial system in any economy. The Health care system in the US is considered to be one of the best in the whole world. This is particularly after the initiation of programs such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which aims at providing affordable health care for all citizens. Despite this development, the healthcare system in the US still faces some challenges. Medicare and Medicaid are the most common programs through which people access healthcare in the United States. While Medicare provides care to the elderly, Medicaid focuses on the young but poor people who cannot afford health care from the different health facilities in the country. In addition to these, other care system such as TRICARE and Veterans Health Administration (VHA) are also common. The two forms of care are available to military personnel and their families. VHA belongs to war veterans only. To further improve the system, a lot of research has been carried out through the years (Gay, 2011).

The objectives of the reforms in the healthcare sector were to reduce the costs associated with health care services through increasing access to insurance funding. The managers of the major insurance groups are thus called upon to encourage greater financial and non-financial performance in the healthcare sector. Despite allocating a large amount of the nation’s GDP to the healthcare sector, it is still difficult to attain the desired growth objectives. Certain challenges are still prevalent in the health care sector. For instance, monitoring accessibility to insurance funding is becoming difficult. As the citizens desire to access healthcare insurance covers through the government provided entities rather than via privately owned entities, the government has placed a limit on the number of those who can achieve the insurance covers. The government has thus put in place measures to ensure that only those with a particular income level for those that pay a certain minimal income levels.

The challenges in accessing health care insurance are immense. The limitation of access to government sponsored health services makes it difficult to achieve the desired level of enrolment. This is because the minimum payable premium results in the targeting of those with higher income levels. This means that those who access the assistance can be able to afford treatment from both private and public institutions while the poor who should be accessing the Medicare and Medicaid provisions are still cut out of the programs. Medicare recipients should thus be educated with the objective of helping them to achieve the desired help. In addition to this, the Medicaid payments should be high enough to enable the recipients to access healthcare services even from private institutions.

In addition to increasing Medicaid payments, access to specially and emergency care services should also be allowed based on Medicaid. This can be achieved through reduced charges for these services. I general, the payments demanded by the healthcare providers should be reduced to enhance the accessibility of these services. This will help to eliminate the optional benefits associated with healthcare insurance. With these reforms, it is projected that beneficiaries will be expanded to enable them to achieve better health care services (national Healthy Policy Forum, 2009). The reforms are also recommended to include expansion of Medicaid cover. The reduction in the number of private insurance service providers is also a way through which the sector is predicted to gain. Reduced competition will help to reduce the inflation of medical service prices (Carlson, 2012).

References

Carlson, K. (2012). Vermont’s journey toward health care reforms, New York: Routledge Publishers

Gay, J.G. (2011). Mortality Amenable to Health care in 31 OECD countries, Oxford: Oxford University Press

National Healthy Policy Forum. (2009). The heritage Foundation Conference on Health Issues, Journal of Health Economics, 3(1): 234-432

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