End of Life Care

Usually, end of life care can take up the last few years of a person’s life depending on the type of illness they have. In Chapter 10 of Weitz, he tells us that Medicare only pays for 6 months of end of life care in hospices. This forces the hospices to choose patients that would fit within that 6 month time span, so that they don’t need to pay out of pocket for those patients. Becoming federally funded rather than non-profit and for care caused hospices to have to adjust to these rules. Is it fair for those who do not fit in this 6 month time span to just be sent away from hospices, just because the federal government won’t pay for them? It seems like this is very similar to the time before Obamacare when insurance companies would turn down people due to pre-existing conditions that they didn’t want to, in the long run, end up funding.

Government Healthcare Insurance Better than Private Insurance?

According to various statistics taken, preventative health visits were higher in children who had Medicaid and CHIP insurance plans as opposed to those with private insurance (private: 83%; Medicaid: 88%). Those with private insurance also reported having to pay more out of pocket expenses than those with Medicaid and CHIP (private: 77%; Mediaid: 26%).

Shopping for Health Insurance is New Seasonal Stress for Many

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/shopping-for-health-insurance-is-new-seasonal-stress-for-many.html?ref=policy

In Abby Goodnough’s article “Shopping for Health Insurance is New Seasonal Stress for Many,” she discusses the Affordable Care Act’s new markets for insurance, and the new way of ‘shopping’ for it via an online platform that allows price comparison across a span of health insurance policies. Although these markets have helped millions of people who could not previously afford insurance, or have been rejected by insurers, they have also seen sudden price or policy changes that force many consumers to change plans every year.

Increased Access to Healthcare but Stagnant Income Levels

I found this article a couple days ago and decided to write my analysis the day after. The first thing I immediately noticed before even reading the article was the title change. A couple days ago, this article was entitled “Uninsured Numbers Drop as Poverty Rate Holds Steady,” but now it reads, “Health Care Gains, but Income Remains Stagnant, the White House Reports.” After reading through the article and the census data, I realized that the former title was misleading in that millions of Americans still remained uninsured and that the medium income remained the same. The revised title was a better representation of the data because many Americans were definitely getting health care access, which was the whole purpose of the Affordable Care Act, but their income levels were remaining the same.