The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) usually referred to as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or the Obamacare was ratified into regulation by President Obama in early 2010. The PPACA seeks to prevent the uninsured from catastrophic expenditures on health that do not just ruin personal credit scores but also result in insolvency and legal proceedings (Vincent & Reed, 2014). The PPACA has been a turning point in the US public health sector and advanced practice nursing.
One of the implications of the PPACA in advanced practice nursing encompasses the improvement of health-care quality, effectiveness, and dependability (Rosenbaum, 2011). Apart from insurance, the PPACA embarks on the task of reconstituting the medical structure for lasting transformations towards quality care, the formation and plan of the health-care performance, and transparency of medical information. The PPACA accomplishes this through the introduction of extensive modifications into Medicare and Medicaid. All such modifications are meant to encourage public players to gradually but vehemently push the health-care sector into acting in dissimilar manners with respect to the way medical experts operate in a more medically incorporated style, assess the excellence of their care and report regarding their practice, and aim at quality enhancement.
The PPACA also ventures in the advancement of a multi-financier National Quality Strategy with the aim of generating multi-financier quality and effectiveness actions to encourage value purchasing, enhanced safety, and a highly widespread medical information in private and public insurance firms. On this note, the PPACA lays the basis for performance evaluation of a system-wide foundation so that patients can more easily obtain information regarding their medical care and the manner in which the caregivers act (Rosenbaum, 2011). All through the schemes to enhance quality as well as information, the PPACA underscores attempts to gather information regarding medical care disparities to make the nation better review development not just for the population en bloc, but also for patient subgroups that are at a high risk for poor health results.
Another implication of the PPACA is ensuring the accessibility of medical care to medically disadvantaged populations. About 60 million people in the US are deemed medically disadvantaged due to an amalgamation of increased medical risks and a shortage of Advanced Practice Nurses (Hamric, Hanson, Tracy, & O’Grady, 2013). The PPACA seeks to reduce the shortage and promote the execution of insurance coverage obligations. Moreover, the PPACA is working towards raising the number of patients cared for in a given time and increasing the number of caregivers. A different implication of the PPACA is the improvement of public health and training of health experts. Over and above insuring as many people as possible, making efforts to improve quality of care, venturing in primary medical care in underprivileged populations, and extending coverage to ensure successful health care services, the PPACA seeks the training of caregivers for enhanced effectiveness. The PPACA also permits new ventures in the training of caregivers. Apart from new outlays in setting up training health institutions, some of the modifications are endorsed but not financed as a section of the PPACA and necessitate separate, suitable financing.
The last implication of the PPACA is long-term care (Vincent & Reed, 2014). To cater for people who require long-term attention, the PPACA generates new Medicaid alternatives to enhance community-anchored care and protect the partners and relatives of the individuals with severe sicknesses from becoming broke. In conclusion, the PPACA has played a vital role in the improvement of the US public health sector and advanced practice nursing.
References
Hamric, A. B., Hanson, C. M., Tracy, M. F., & O’Grady, E. T. (2013). Advanced practice nursing: An integrative approach. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Health Sciences.
Rosenbaum, S. (2011). The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Implications for public health policy and practice. Public Health Reports, 126(1), 130.
Vincent, D., & Reed, P. G. (2014). Affordable Care Act overview and implications for advancing nursing. Nursing science quarterly, 27(3), 254-259.