Confronting The Trade-Offs In Health Reform: What We Learned From The ACA

Implicitly or explicitly, all health care reform involves trade-offs, in which policy makers balance competing goals and interests to reach a preferred outcome. The US Senate may soon take up the US House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA), a bill that would radically rebalance the trade-offs made in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has recently released its estimates of the net effects of the AHCA on coverage and spending. We can, and should, compare and contrast these outcomes with evidence from the ACA. Like most large pieces of legislation, the ACA got some things right and some things wrong. In evaluating how to move forward, we can benefit from seven years of research on its implementation. A team of researchers assembled by the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) recently assessed the early evidence on the ACA and distilled the conclusions into a series of policy briefs, the LDI ACA Impact Series. The series synthesizes what we know, and what we don’t, about the ACA’s effects on health insurance Marketplaces, access and coverage, labor markets, and cost containment. The findings highlight real successes—most notably the expansion of coverage to more than 20 million Americans—as well as substantial deficiencies, such as rising premiums and growing insurer departures from the Marketplaces. More broadly, the series throws into sharp relief a number of trade-offs—between...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Costs and Spending Following the ACA Insurance and Coverage Medicaid and CHIP Medicare ACA repeal and replace American Health Care Act Essential Health Benefits Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics Source Type: blogs