Wider health insurance coverage for young Americans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduces their reliance on state workers’ compensation programs when they require emergency care, according to RAND research. The RAND analysis of younger workers, which examined millions of medical records in four populous states, shows that the Affordable Care Act may generate widespread and varying impacts...

By enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), Congress provoked change in the status quo in American health care delivery and payment. Although challenged by conservative voices resistant to change, the ACA survived its recent constitutional challenge. Regardless of how Congress tries to amend the ACA in the future, one vestige of the ACA likely to remain at least in...

Major health policy creation or changes, including governmental and private policies affecting health care delivery are based on health care reform(s). Health care reform has been a global issue over the years and the United States has seen proposals for multiple reforms over the years. A successful, health care proposal in the United States with involvement of the federal government was the sh...

Marla R. Robinson, MSc, OTR/L, BCPR, is Assistant Director, Inpatient Therapy Services, University of ChicagoMedicine, Chicago. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA; Pub. L. No. 111–148) is designed to change the way health care services are delivered and reimbursed in the United States. Health care reform efforts stemming from the ACA will result in critical changes for ...

65 On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA or the Act) into law.1 ACA aims to improve access to care and health outcomes through a number of mechanisms, including requiring most individuals to carry health insurance, prohibiting insurers from denying health insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and creating exchanges through w...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and its amendments by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 constitute landmark legislation known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA has made many changes in the Medicare program as part of comprehensive health reform for the U.S. health care sector. Title III of the ACA pertains to improving the efficiency and quality of ...

As an essential part of its effort to achieve near universal coverage, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) extends sizable tax credits to most people who buy insurance on the newly established health care exchanges. Yet several lawsuits have been filed challenging the availability of those tax credits in the thirty-four states that refused to set up their own exchanges. The lawsuits are premised on a...

The recent enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, and the ongoing debate over reform of the U.S. health care system, raise numerous important ethical issues. This article reviews basic provisions of the ACA; examines underlying moral and policy issues in the U.S. health care reform debate; and addresses health care reform's likely effects on access to care, e...

This commentary reviews the many different ways the Affordable Care Act (ACA) explicitly and implicitly attempted to improve health equity, and then assesses how the Republican proposal to repeal and replace the ACA (the proposed American Health Care Act) would impact efforts to improve health equity. Although the American health care system still had a long way to go to achieve health equity, ...