Healthcare reform puts tens of millions of families and small businesses in control of their health care, making it easier for them to buy affordable private insurance. It protects people with pre-existing conditions and helps them get affordable care, including preventive services. It reduces the federal deficit by more than $100 billion over a decade and helps put our economy back on track.
The reforms make it easier to compare costs and coverage on the marketplace, and create a new competitive insurance market that will give consumers more choices and help lower their premiums. They also provide financial assistance to people who need it – from the lowest-cost bronze plan to the highest-cost platinum plans. And the ACA prohibits insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, and ensures that everyone has access to preventive services and other important benefits that are essential to good health, such as cancer screenings, immunizations, and pregnancy care.
Moreover, the reforms take an important step toward bringing anticorruption tools and approaches into the core of healthcare reform processes. They establish monitoring systems that look for evidence of overcharging, informal payments, ghost patients, and inflation of statistics – and they include mechanisms to address these problems and make systematic changes.
The reforms also shift the emphasis for the NHS away from treating people who are already ill and towards health prevention – such as encouraging the population to adopt healthy lifestyles, for example by improving the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables in supermarkets. This will reduce the demand for expensive medical interventions in future and help to improve the nation’s overall health outcomes.
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