Healthcare legislation involves creating, implementing, and regulating laws and rules that help manage the nation’s healthcare system. Various health care policies help manage the healthcare system, the most prominent being the Affordable Care Act.
Affordable Care Act
The Affordable Care Act is an extensive health care reform law enacted in 2010.
This law was enacted to perform three main functions:
- Ensure that affordable health insurance is available to more people. This law provides subsidiaries that help lower the cost of healthcare in households with incomes that fall within 100% to 400% of the federal poverty level.
- Carry out the expansion of the Medicaid program to cover adults with income that is below 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL), although not all states in the United States have expanded their Medicaid program
- Support innovations in medical care delivery that would help lower the cost of healthcare in the United States.
Other enacted healthcare legislation include:
- Social Security Amendments of 1965: It established Medicaid and Medicare.
- Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985: This allowed employees to continue receiving healthcare coverage if they lose it due to job loss, leave, etc.
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996: This helped limit insurance companies so that there is a check on how they could limit people with preexisting conditions.
Benefits of Health Insurance legislation
- Stops Unfair Insurance Practices: Health insurance legislation prevents health insurance companies from dropping your health coverage if you get sick. So long as you pay your premiums, your health insurance is absolutely guaranteed.
- Stops Lifetime and Annual Limits on Insurance coverage: The health insurance legislation prevents insurance companies from setting a fixed dollar limit on the number of healthcare bills they cover.
- Coverage for preventive care: Health insurance legislation makes it compulsory that health insurance plans provide coverage for preventive care at no cost to the citizen. Hence, health insurance companies will cover costs of immunizations, screening for cancer, diabetes, etc.
- Regulate premium cost: Healthcare legislation helps regulate premium cost. They do this by requiring insurance companies to provide reasons and justify any increase of premium cost by 10% or more.
Conclusion
The health insurance legislation in the United States has gone a long way to help ensure that health insurance companies do right by their users. It has also helped with providing insurance for citizens with no insurance who have low wages.