A few months back, almost the whole world recovered somewhat from what was termed as a financial debacle. It was not simply that people lost money, jobs and peace of mind—the entire dynamics of many industries were affected.
While talking about affordable health insurance and how the new healthcare reforms would help individuals and families to get it,
there are number of questions that come to everybody’s mind. There is a lot of guessing, possible implementation of rules at certain dates, etc—however, if we talk about immediate benefits of healthcare reforms to get affordable health insurance, there is not much talk.
In this article, we will talk about the immediate effects of healthcare reforms that would make the concept of affordable health insurance more feasible.
• Small businesses will be offered tax credits if they extend affordable health insurance to their employees. Tax credits of up to 35% of premiums will be available to firms that choose to offer coverage.
• Children with a pre-existing condition will not be discriminated on this basis. Family health insurance surely will become more affordable for individuals.
• A high-risk pool will help affordable health insurance for individuals who have a pre-existing condition and are uninsured. This will work till exchanges become functional.
• To make health insurance more affordable, the healthcare reforms eliminate copayments for preventive services and exempts preventive services from deductibles under the Medicare program.
• Students and young adults can remain in their parent’s health insurance policy till the age of 26 years. This is one of those rules which will make student health insurance highly affordable.
• Till the exchanges are functional, healthcare reforms create a temporary reinsurance program to help offset the costs of expensive premiums for employers and retirees for health benefits for retirees’ age between 5564 years.
• To make health insurance affordable, it prohibits health insurance companies from placing lifetime caps on coverage.
• Healthcare reforms also restrict the use of annual limits to ensure access to needed care in all new plans and grandfathered group health plans.
• To enforce consumers and to make them avail all facilities of affordable health insurance plans, healthcare reforms ensure consumers in new plans have access to an effective internal and external appeals process to appeal decisions by their health insurance plan.
• Healthcare reforms require plans in the individual and small group market to spend 80% of premium dollars on medical services, and plans in the large group market to spend 85% percent. This will help health care to be affordable for consumers.
• Healthcare reforms also provides new investments to increase the number of primary care practitioners, including doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants.
It is clear that lots of clauses and rules are being implemented within a short period of time. A lot of companies are already trying to offer benefits to the consumers so that they are not forced to change their insurers.
