Want Better Healthcare? Check How ‘Public Option to Obamacare’ Delivers

It was almost five decades back when there were certain actions taken to help the poor and the elderly population of America, received some relief in health care costs. With the federal government of USA introducing Medicaid and Medicare, citizen of the U.S. received certain relaxation in medical aids. In 2010, after almost half a century, President Barack Obama again took the initiative of coming out to help the needy and the constrained population of America. Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare (more of a colloquial term) has come up with some sort of relief for every needy soul of America. Today, after 6 years of its successful implementation, President Obama has come up with an additional benefit ‘public option to Obamacare’ for the people of America.

Health care expenditure can be a major cause bringing severe damages to health in the United States of America. Expensive treatments, prescriptions, drugs, hospital stays, laboratory tests, all can even make a person go bankrupt. However, the long-standing hindrances in providing adequate health care to the people of USA seem to be finding solutions with Obamacare ultimately. Ever since ACA was enacted into law, the following changes have been observed over a few years time, like:

• The rate of uninsured people in the US have reduced to 43%
• 2010- 16.1% US citizen were uninsured
• 2015- 9.1% people remain uninsured
• estimated reduction in middle aged unable to afford health insurance coverage to 5.5%
• Federal goverment could reduce its debt towards collecting $600-$1000 for each enrolee to health insurance plans
• Reduction to about 3.4% in middle aged people reporting poor health conditions
• The health care payment process too has transformed. Around 30% of the traditional payments of Medicare are flowing through the alternative models of payment.

All these and more such reforms have made serious contributions to sustained time period of spending on health sector for every insuree. Yet, there’s lot more that has to be achieved to achieve the target.

Changing how the health care system delivered

Earlier, when ACA wasn’t introduced, the health industry depended mostly on free service payment system by individual donors. The system would levy penalty on those organizations that who did efficient delivery while they were incapable of rewarding better quality care providers.

With modifications in health coverage law and further adding health option, those organizations can now provide those advantages that health insurance plans like Medicare and Medicaid were given better payments. The goal is to align them better with the actual costs that come in providing care. With changes in Medicare payment plans, the private sector too received decreased price in the health expenditure.

ACA helps detect health frauds

Many policies were included in Obamacare to identify and prevent frauds that happen in the health insurance sector. Higher scrutinization before someone gets enrolled into Medicare or Medicaid to prevent high rates of fraud prevalant in the domain. If any organization was found incurring more than $1 million loss, were charged stronger penalties to prevent such crimes. Implementing the “value based payment,” where Medicare related systems tie up with different health care enterprises and professionals for fee-for-service paying. There are efforts to foster a health insurance market