Blog assignment #7: 2010 healthcare reform bill

This week, in public heatlh, we learned about health insurance, access to care, and the new health care reform. One statistic presented in class was comparing Per capita health spending to Per capita GDP. Compared to the other OECD countries, US is an outlier, in this case. This indicates that the United States spends way too much money on health care; however, international comparison (in a different statitstic) shows that average life expectancy of the United States is low relative to other developed countries. To tackle this irony, and to provide Americans better health care services more effectively, president Obama and the Congress have been working on and have finally gotten passsed "the 2010 Health Care reform bill." First of all, this bill will expend insurance to 32 million uninsured Americans. Under this health care reform bill, small businesses will get tax credits covering up to 50% of employee premiums. Also, it will constrain the growth of Medicare (which will be very helpful in paying for reform) by various ways, one of which, the donut hole coverage. Seniors with this coverage will be given rebate but be given limited precription medication coverage. As we have seen in class, among the uninsured, many of them are actually young adults because after thier parents' coverage, they do not feel the need of being insured. To solve this problem, the cut off age for young adults tto be covered by their parents' insurance became the age 27, indicating more young adults will be insured. New insurance plans will include checkups and other preventive care with no co pays. To improve transparency in insurance companies, from now on, they need to reveal how much money is spent, and there will be more and enhanced fraud abuse checks. Some small businesses might not be happy with health care reform bill because it will require them more than 50 workers to provide medical insurance for their employees or pay a 2-thousand dollar fine per worker. Also, now that the budget became tighter and the transparency is more emphasized, insurance companies are not satisfied. I think educated middle class will be the most happy with it because among the uninsured, most of them are uneducated, and therefore they do not realize how important it is to be insurance in a long term. They tend to see what's directly in front of them. Also, minorities and women are very in favor of this bill because this bill emphasiezes equity: for example, it is now illegal for insurance companies to make health care more expensive for women. I think it is a good piece of legislation; however its too ideal. it will be very hard to first implement this. I think it will cause so much chaos, especially, educating the uninsured will be extra hard...This will affect my family because we currently have Masshealth(we are from Massachusetts), which is a state-level insurance; Massachusetts provide insurance even for the people with no social security number(we are international students).