How does the Affordable Care Act ACA attempt to reduce health and health care disparities?

How has the ACA affected health care providers?

For physicians and patients, the expansion of coverage presents an opportunity to improve patients' access to care and nurture the doctor-patient relationship. The ACA has also posed new challenges, like narrow “provider” networks, tight prescription drug formularies, and high cost-sharing responsibilities.

What are the disparities in health coverage?

Health disparities include differences in health outcomes, such as life expectancy, mortality, health status, and prevalence of health conditions. Health care disparities include differences between groups in measures such as health insurance coverage, affordability, access to and use of care, and quality of care.

How does the Affordable Care Act protect patients and healthcare professionals?

If you get sick, an insurance company cannot cancel your policy. Health insurance companies cannot turn down your application because of your health status. Women can no longer be charged more for insurance than men. In fact, insurance rates cannot be based on gender or gender identity at all.

What health benefits are mandated by the ACA?

The Affordable Care Act requires non-grandfathered health insurance coverage in the individual and small group markets to cover essential health benefits (EHB), which include items and services in at least the following ten benefit categories: (1) ambulatory patient services; (2) emergency services; (3) hospitalization ...

How does the ACA help the poor?

Health insurance is expensive and can be difficult to afford for people with lower or moderate incomes. In response, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides sliding-scale subsidies that lower premiums and insurers offer plans with reduced out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for eligible individuals.

How to reduce racial disparities in health care?

Effectively addressing disparities in the quality of care requires improved data systems, increased regulatory vigilance, and new initiatives to appropriately train medical professionals and recruit more providers from disadvantaged minority backgrounds.

Why do Americans oppose the Affordable Care Act?

They oppose the mandate that all Americans must have health insurance (the individual mandate), and they oppose a government role in health care. Yet Medicare, a mandatory insurance for seniors administered by the federal government since 1965, is overwhelmingly approved by the American public.

What is the overall goal of ACA?

The ACA has three primary goals at its foundation, collectively known as the Triple Aim. The Triple Aim goals are: improve patient care, improve population health, and reduce the cost of health care.

How did the Affordable Care Act impact healthcare in this country?

Since 2010, The ACA has given more than 40 million Americans access to health care, expanded Medicaid to 40 states to cover 21 million low-income adults under 65, and protected as many as 133 million (Opens in a new tab) with pre-existing conditions from losing their health insurance.

What are the negative effects of the Affordable Care Act?

It was also known that consumers would face a very different health insurance world under the ACA, with some people seeing their premiums go down and some seeing them go up, and the majority of Americans seeing higher deductibles, higher copays, and a smaller pool of providers.

What are the biggest health disparities in the US?

Heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death across race, ethnicity, and gender (see Table 2-1). African Americans were 30 percent more likely than whites to die prematurely from heart disease in 2010, and African American men are twice as likely as whites to die prematurely from stroke (HHS, 2016b,d).

What are the benefits of the ACA program?

What are 5 of the essential health benefits provided by the Affordable Care Act?

The 10 categories of benefits in an EHB package are: 1) ambulatory patient services, 2) emergency services, 3) hospitalization, 4) maternity and newborn care, 5) mental health and substance use disorder services, 6) prescription drugs, 7) rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices, 8) lab services, 9) ...

How did the Affordable Care Act benefit individuals?

It did so by expanding Medicaid to people with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level (the poverty level in the continental U.S. is $15,060 for a single individual in 2024); creating new health insurance exchange markets through which individuals can purchase coverage and receive financial help to afford ...

How does ACA improve quality of care?

Improvements in community health centers – The ACA also provides for improving the quality of our care by strengthening the nation's network of community health centers and testing new methods for delivering services, for example, coordinating care among physicians and community resources.

What is the main purpose of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 according to the professor?

The first—and central—aim is to achieve near-universal coverage and to do so through shared responsibility among government, individuals, and employers. A second aim is to improve the fairness, quality, and affordability of health insurance coverage.

How does the Affordable Care Act affect patient healthcare access?

Gaining insurance coverage also increased the probability of having a usual place of care by between 47.1 percent and 86.5 percent. These findings suggest that not only has the ACA decreased the number of uninsured Americans, but has substantially improved access to care for those who gained coverage.

How can we reduce health disparities?

What is an example of a healthcare disparity?

For example, Americans living in rural areas are more likely to die from unintentional injuries, heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic lower respiratory disease than their urban counterparts. These health disparities account for significant costs to states and communities.

Why is policy important in addressing healthcare disparities?

In formulating policy, considering health equity means “optimizing the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, learn, and age; working with other sectors to address the factors that influence health; and naming racism as a force in determining how these social determinants are distributed.”²⁰ For example ...