Key Initiatives of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

¶ … Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

The health of a nation's population is the most important sector in the building of the nation's economy (Kovne, Knickman & Jonas, 2011). A sick nation cannot effectively produce anything substantial to keep it running. Thus, it is in this view that each government seeks to provide better quality and affordable health services. In so doing, the governments set up rules and laws that act to regulate the health sector.

The acts that the government has drafted and implemented have various initiatives that drive them. These initiatives include reducing costs and so as to make access to health affordable and protecting the consumers (Parks, 2012). In the previous times, the very industrious Americans had to live with having to pay the price for policies that let the insurance service companies exploit them. The act holds insurers accountable by allowing new tools for cracking down the exploitative health insurance premiums increases, and ensuring that at least eighty percent of the premium money is spent on provision of quality health care and not administration costs as profits, salaries and marketing costs.

The law also eliminated the most horrible form of abuse of the insurance companies by putting in place the Patient's Bill of Rights. The bill protects the consumers via policies, for example, prohibiting insurers from denying children with pre-existing conditions coverage and making lifetime dollar limits on coverage illegal. The act also helps to facilitate for simplification of health cost systems to much cheap and affordable costs (Parks, 2012).

Another initiative that has been implemented is that on improving the quality and efficiency of the healthcare service providers. The patient protection and affordable care act (PPACA) will advance the efficiency and quality of these services for everyone. Payments for services offered will be made on view of the quality provided. New patient care models will be initiated and passed to all consumers up to those in rural.

The other component of the act entails prevention of chronic diseases and improving public health. For this to be achieved, the nation's health system will set up initiatives to provide the momentum and the infrastructure. The new interagency prevention council will work in hand with the Prevention and Public Health Investment Fund so as to meet the goal on preventing chronic disease occurrence (Kovne et al., 2011). The barriers that existed in the past to access medical precautionary services will be removed. The disease prevention systems will be modernized and campaigns for educating and creating awareness on these initiatives will be conducted.

Moreover, the act also seeks to improve on the healthcare workforce (Parks, 2012). The act will promote and implement innovations for the training of the health workforce. It also includes the recruitment of new workforce and setting up of new workforce commission. The available workforce will be retained as the new workforce comes on board to supplement the available.

Another part of the act is that which will ensure transparency and program integrity. Under this, the health program will provide information to the public on the health systems available and in addition promote implementation of new set of requirements to curb fraud and abuse in both private and public programs (Wolper, 2004). The workforce will be trained on effective patient handling measures that will increase the trust of the patients in the healthcare providers.

However, there is nothing that is of the human making that is perfect. These progressive steps that the government has taken to improve the health care services are facing opposition because to implement they may be costly (Kovne et al., 2011). Such is the act that seeks to improve on the issue of infrastructure and health provision innovations. The cost of these innovations is quite high and the developing the infrastructure required is relatively expensive. This will affect the expenditure on health budget negatively. But considering the benefits that come with this act, the negative impact can be overlooked.