Government Health Insurance And Regulations

Maria Alejandra Arcos

Instructor Name

Critical Issues in Business Class

3 January 2020

Government Health Insurance and Regulations

The health agencies of the United States have managed to develop a set of laws designed to protect the well-being of the public with the help of oversight provided by Congress CITATION Kar17 \l 3081 (Palmer). The concerned department called the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS oversees the entire process that concerns the general health issues and concerns of all the citizens of the US. It is also responsible for the initiation of projects that are aimed at the improvement of public health and the conduction of further research for future use. The HHS has helped in the enforcement of several legislative measures for this purpose. Some of the notorious ones of these measures are the Healthcare Quality Improvement Act of 1986, the Children Health Insurance Program of 2009 and the Affordable Care Act of 2010, known in the public as “Obamacare”.

Obamacare was a really good piece of legislation that has a lot of benefits for the common folk that most were not even aware of. This is because there has been a massive propaganda against it. Furthermore, it was further weakened by a series of amendments made by President Trump. Finally, the act was repealed by the introduction of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, rendering it ineffective as per the end of 2018.

This shows that there are several issues in the legislative framework regarding healthcare rules and regulations. Here, the question arises What is the biggest issue that is faced by the US system of healthcare? Eric Topol, founder, and director of Scripps Research Institute describes the issue in a single term: Shallow Medicine CITATION Eri19 \l 3081 (Topol). Shallow medicine points to the existing medical practices. In these times, the medical practice is carried out with insufficient context, time, data and presence of the required physical or doctor.

Although data is available when the patient comes to see his doctor, yet we often observe that it is not relevant. Furthermore, the required data of the patients take the form of several incomplete pictures as it is often spread around with various doctors and healthcare insurance system. Also, there is a difference in formats of collection and storage of data varying from one hospital or clinic to the next. This makes the task of gathering data even more difficult.

Add the concern of time given to the patient during his appointments with his doctor and the problem multiples tenfold CITATION Twi17 \l 3081 (Twiddy). An average appointment of a patient with a doctor lasts only at an average of seven minutes, during which the doctor is busy noting the data of his patient for diagnosis. Therefore, the doctor has minimal time for face-to-face interaction with the patient.

These methods are the requirement of the existing medical system that has been implemented by the concerned governing agency, the HHS. To fix this problem, certain changes need to be made on an urgent basis. For one, the doctor needs to feel that he, as well as his patient, is not being rushed by the paperwork that the system has declared as compulsory for them. Otherwise, there is a possibility that the doctor might himself end up in a hospital bed due to depression and stress from overwork. Another thing that the healthcare system needs to get done is the standardization of the system at records of the patient's medical history. This variation in format may not matter to the doctor that read the file, but these changes in different formats may end up being a headache for the patient if he needs his data for legal matters.

Works Cited

BIBLIOGRAPHY Palmer, Karen S. "A Brief History: Universal Health Care Efforts in the US." Physicians for a National Health Program (2017).

Topol, Eric. Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Basic Books, 2019.

Twiddy, David. "Patients and physicians agree: Not enough time for care." American Academy of Family Physicians (2017).