Legislative Health Policy Health Issues to Resolve

HEALTH ISSUES

Health Issues to Resolve

The issue with legislative policymaking is that it has to be transparent and efficient in its decision-making to provide justice to the eligible ones without making matters delayed or worse. The accountability levels are high for this department of the country as it would not want to lose the trust of its people. To maintain the institutional balance, the simplicity of procedures needs to be ensured. However, some challenges could be hard to address by the legislation.

The three issues that I believe are the most difficult to resolve through legislative policy include:

i. The identification of population groups that should receive subsidized coverage from tax revenues

ii. Specific services that should be covered under Medicare and Medicaid

iii. In my retirement plan, how much should I plan to rely on Medicare to cover my healthcare costs in my aging years

The health financing mechanism has to rely greatly on government policies for coverage so that underserved or vulnerable segments of the population could be better protected. However, the identification of such segments remains a challenge. The government has to contemplate several times before setting the right subsidies quota to prevent the unfair treatment of benefits packages. The legislative principles control the partial or full diverse coverage mechanisms to assure the maximization of universal health coverage (UHC) (Vilcu et al., 2016). Again, technical, administrative, targeting, and monitoring problems do arise along with cost-cutting of the subsidies via tax revenues, possibly excluding considerably poor or deserving segments.

People have the right to seek protection against unforeseeable and shattering medical costs for which health insurance should be the most convenient option, which is not the case in reality. Whether it should be public or private insurance and what amount it should cover given the limited wage rate given by the government are some of the concerns that health insurers are looking to. The share of GDP given to the health expenditure has expanded over the year for the needy ones, in the form of Medicaid and Medicare programs passed in the legislation as Title XVII and XIX under the Social Security Act in 1965 (Hoffman, Jr, Klees & Curtis, 2000). Nevertheless, numerous frauds and abuse of these facilities have made the government rethink its strategies and slowed down the budgeting for this area.

Recently, the government has taken measures to cover maximum retiree health coverage costs, which was not before 2006 (Pozen, 2015). This transpired since local governments were not obliged by the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) to reveal their post-employment benefits majorly, including health insurance (Pozen, 2015). After criticism from the public about less attention given to pension plans, the government has revised the Medicare premiums and premiums for supplements (Medigap) (Pozen, 2015). Although the government knows that healthcare plans are costly for its budgeting plans, outlining certain services, like dental or eye care, has to be re-considered. This creates pressure on retirees on what costs to include in their retirement health coverage plan after calculating discount rates to reduce long-term liabilities. The legislative procedures would be different for certain states and particular professions; for instance, in Ohio, Medicare part B has been reimbursed for the retired teachers with a fixed stipend for fire and police retired staff (Petrini, 2020). In Ohio, the funding of coverage is more than 50%, which is great headway in the said direction., Still, when in old age, I would have to scrutinize the state-wise and profession-wise health coverage and whether the legislation would provide for it strongly.