Academic essay writing and discussion board preparation

¶ … ACA has had on physicians. This is related to my field of study, and to the article that I worked with last week. This issue can be examined in terms of how it affects private practice, how the demand conditions have changed and how the workload has changed. There are a lot of different dimensions to this story. I have chosen this focus because it interests me.

The Affordable Care Act allowed millions of Americans to enjoy medical insurance coverage, when they previously had not been able to do so. One of the predictions before the ACA was brought into force was that bringing millions of people into the health care system would strain the system's existing resources. The theory is that the system was already near capacity, so adding that much new demand would strain that capacity.

There have been a number of articles providing anecdotal evidence that there are changes within the medical system. Some physicians have noted that they are working harder, but getting paid less as government tries to lower the costs in the health care system. The result is that many private physicians are turning to larger clinics and groups in order to limit their workloads, and gain a measure of financial protection.

The reason for this is that there are high fixed costs associated with running a private practice office. Basic economics tells us that when margins are driven downwards, volumes have to increase in order to cover fixed costs. While the new economic reality is that volumes are increasing, this makes the job much harder, seeing more patients and earning less money.

Unit 7 Discussion Board

I would need to strengthen most of the Unit 6 paper with research. In particular, it would be good to find hard numbers for the financial impacts of the ACA. The current state is that there is anecdotal evidence, but if there are studies that show the hard number impacts, or even good predictive models from before the ACA was passed, these would add good weight to the argument.

While there are no scholarly articles published yet on the financial impact of the ACA on physicians, there have been some evaluations of the impacts on consumers. Riggs, Buttorff and Alexander (2015) have examined the impact of out-of-pocket spending caps on those with group health insurance. They found that most people with group health insurance will benefit from the spending caps. If people are paying less for health care insurance, this makes it reasonable that the impact on those providing health care services is negative, though the authors do not specifically draw that link.

Unit 8 Discussion