We sat drinking coffee on my front porch as I listened to Linda tearfully explain that she and her husband, John, were forced to separate and divorce. Sounds odd, but it was their only solution to be able to get treatment for her recent breast cancer diagnosis. Yes, she had catastrophic insurance coverage, but with the high deductibles and limits of coverage, the exuberant cost of cancer treatment would bring them to financial ruin, and they would lose everything. In 1998, Linda and John divorced, and she quit her job to qualify for government assistance. He stayed in their house while she and their two children moved into government subsidized housing. She was then able to obtain Medicaid and begin her …show more content…
Under the law, the ACA does not address cost containment of private health care prices (Fuse-Brown, 2015). The ACA adequately addresses the cost of Medicare as it sets the prices for care; thus, allowing the government to reduce overtreatment and other wasteful health care costs which figure at approximately 30% of Medicare spending. However, the ACA has a blind spot in controlling hospital market solutions, price competition and rate regulation, and the enforcement of antitrust policies (Fuse-Brown, 2015). According to Chamseddine (2015), the ACA does not restrict providers from corroborating, if it is accomplished in an anti-competitive way that discourages …show more content…
The ACA improves accessibility in several ways. One example is accessibility for women. Before the ACA went into law, women were denied insurance coverage because of their gender (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS Women], n.d.). However, according to the HHS, more than 1.1 million women between the ages of 19 and 25 have health care who otherwise would have gone uninsured. The ACA established dependent coverage for young adults to the age of 26 according to HHS (n.d.). This expansion allows women to get early cervical cancer screening which is a predictor of survival (Robbins et al., 2015). According to Robbins et al., (2015), the proportion of early diagnosis increased from 67.9% in 2009 to 84.3% in 2011 which researcher link to the