Universal Health Care

My understanding of the state of affairs in the development of health policy in the United States is there have been some important policy innovations, most notably the establishment in the mid-1960s of the Medicare and Medicaid programs , but reformers advocating publicly-guaranteed universal health coverage have been continually disillusioned. So, in the spring of 2010 when President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act commonly known as ‘Obamacare’, a major piece of health care reform was made into a law. Yet, although the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is by far the most ambitious health care reform enacted in the USA since Medicare and Medicaid, this reform stops short of guaranteeing universal health …show more content…
The most important thing to "understand" about quality in healthcare according to the Institute of Medicine is understanding the definition quality of health care as “the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge” A primary objective of the United States (U.S.) health care system is to provide the combination of health services that optimizes the population's health; efforts to improve the quality of health services are key to reaching this goal. According to the Institute of Medicine, there are six important components of a health care system that provides high quality care to individuals. First, the system is safe in all patients, in all processes, all the time. Second, a high quality health care system provides care that is effective, wherever possible, is based on the use of systematically obtained evidence to make determinations regarding whether a preventive service, diagnostic test, therapy, or no intervention would produce the best outcomes. Third, a high quality health care system is patient-centered. This concept encompasses the following: