Health Policy Impacting Personal Life Essay Paper

Reflect upon and discuss a healthcare policy or law that impacts your current work environment or personal life. My profession is emergency medicine

Health Policy Impacting Personal Life

Environmental determinant of disease and health are pervasive and integral to components of health care delivery to include assessing, diagnosing, intervention, planning and evaluation. Although not every case of ill health has an environmental etiology, nearly every case of ill health is related to an environmental hazard for which health care appropriately intervenes in the form of advice or evaluation. Health care policy allows for a proactive approach to managing the environmental influences as it enables medical personnel to initiate preventive actions to abate the environmental hazards before they can manifest as a disease. Health Policy Impacting Personal Life Essay Paper  To be more precise, a health care policy is primarily designed to protect the public safety/health, especially by targeting individual behaviors that present safety or health hazards to the population (Misltead & Short, 2019).  The present paper discusses how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health care policy is used for improving population health and its impact on the personal life.

Health implies more than just health care. While accessing clinical factors is a significant driver of health, it is moderated by other drivers to include the economic, social and physical environments. The realm of the public policy is vast since it is a system of funding priorities, causes of action (or inaction), regulatory measures, and laws that are implemented by the government or its representatives. Because health care is just one of the factors that influence health, health policy is more than just health care policy. A health care policy affects the drivers of health by shaping and influencing economic, social and physical environments while also creating opportunities and incentives that influence behavior (Rawal, 2016).

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The ACA Health care policy is intended to address three primary goals: support innovative medical care approaches designed to generally reduce the cost of health care; expand the Medicaid program to cover more beneficiaries; and increase the availability of affordable health insurance. The policy influences personal life in four ways. Firstly, it provides incentives, creates opportunities and reduces the barriers that influence the personal choices impacting health. The policy is designed to ensure that more Americans have access to health care by reducing the financial barriers. This allows individuals to live healthier lives and those who cannot afford to pay for health insurance to receive help. Additionally, it ensures that health insurance entities are incentivized (through competition) to reduce policy costs. Ultimately, the beneficiaries of the health care policy are guaranteed health care access (Rawal, 2016).

Secondly, ACA provides direct support in ways that affect the drivers to public health. The policy ensures that low income earners who cannot afford to pay for health insurance have health insurance paid for by the government. The policy is designed to reduce the financial barriers and create the opportunity for low income earners in America to have basic health care. In applying the policy, persons with access to health care live longer and healthier lives. The policy ends up affecting drivers of health as access to health care is a driver of health (Kuramoto & Yuen, 2017).

Thirdly, ACA sets the requirements and mandates that protect the public. Lacking access to health insurance because of financial reasons is a leading cause of ill health as it implies that persons without health insurance would be unable to access health care. The policy is implemented to address these problems. The policy has ensured that the government has invested to improving health care equity and access by having more Americans with health insurance so that more Americans can access the health care required to maintain good health. This ensures that the policy ends up protecting Americans with low incomes (Vogel, 2019).

Finally, ACA regulates the available resources to prevent harm. The government has control over public funds that are acquired through taxes. This ensures that funds (as a resources under the control of the government) can be distributed to serve the public good by ensuring that even the low income earners have an opportunity to receive health care that allows them to maintain good health. Without the government paying for health care access to American low income earners, they would be unable to access health care thus adding to their health burden as they surfer more health issues without receiving care (Milstead & Short, 2019). In fact, ACA creates, regulates and maintains public resources that foster supportive environments for good health. ACA is funded by taxes and are open to use by low income earners. How the public health programs are planned, applied and maintained impacts the accessibility of needed health care. These factors create the opportunities to getting health care and making the choices that keeps many Americans healthy (Vogel, 2019).

One must accept that health care policies are the system of funding priorities, causes of action (or inaction), regulatory measures, and laws that are implemented by the government or its representatives to influence population health. In addition, one must acknowledge that ACA is a significant health care policy that is primarily designed to protect the public safety/health, especially by targeting individual behaviors that present safety or health hazards to the population. The policy influences personal life in four ways: provides incentives, creates opportunities and reduces the barriers that influence the personal choices impacting health; provides direct support in ways that affect the drivers to public health; sets the requirements and mandates that protect the public; and regulates the available resources to prevent harm. Overall, ACA is a health care policy that improves population health and impacts personal life.

References

Kuramoto, F., & Yuen, F. (2017). The Affordable Care Act and Integrated Behavioural Health Care: Meeting the Health and Behavioral Health Needs of a Diverse Society. Taylor & Francis.

Milstead, J. & Short, N. (2019). Health Policy and Politics: A Nurse’s Guide (6^th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Rawal P. (2016). The Affordable Care Act: Examining the Facts: Examining the Facts. ABC-CLIO.

Vogel, D. (2019). Health Care Consolidation Under the Affordable Care Act. Nova Science Publishers, Inc.  Health Policy Impacting Personal Life Essay Paper