HomePublic HealthAspects of the Affordable Care Act

Aspects of the Affordable Care Act

Topic: Public Health
Words: 282 Pages: 1
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Table of Contents
  1. Introduction
  2. Discussion
  3. Conclusion
  4. Reference

Introduction

The signing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) greatly impacted the entire healthcare system in the United States. To understand its significance, it is necessary to study in more detail the key points of this bill. It is associated with the Medicaid program, originally designed to help low-income families and the disabled and funded by federal and state governments. The ACA, widely known as Obamacare, has given states the authority to expand the scope of Medicaid to other people in need, including people under 65 (Green, 2018). In addition, the provisions of ACA made browsing healthcare insurance through the marketplace more transparent. Before that, it was common when families not have proper healthcare insurance because of dishonest employers or the complexity of searching programs. Thus, the healthcare insurance industry, for the first time, tried to become more client-oriented.

Discussion

One of the under-discussed themes concerning ACA is the way how they may contribute to the well functioning of the act. As Green (2018) indicates, “With the passage of the ACA, nurses are in a prime position to now practice as fully as possible, reducing barriers to advanced practice nursing” (para 15). In other words, nurses acquired more opportunities for advanced care, but this also created new responsibilities as professionals. Another role that nurses have is the dissemination of cultural competencies across the healthcare system. Being the biggest group of professionals in healthcare, they are the nearest practitioners to patients.

Conclusion

After the establishment of ACA, the high proportion of ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities expanded or acquired their insurance, so the patient base has diversified. Therefore, nurses needed to find connections with new minority groups to eliminate health disparities among them.

Reference

Green, S. Z. (2018). The environment, policy, and health effectiveness. In A. Falkner & S. Z. Green (Eds.), Community & public health: The future of health care. Grand Canyon University.