Reducing Healthcare Costs and Improving Patient Health: Leveraging The Affordable Care Act to Address the Growing Diabetes Epidemic
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Date
2015-09-02
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
The enactment of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 marks the largest shift in U.S. healthcare delivery since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid. High costs of care, poor access to health insurance, and a lack of efficiency in healthcare delivery required comprehensive reform in order to address these problems. While the passage of the ACA was an intensely divisive and partisan process, its implementation has the potential to achieve these goals by restraining discriminatory insurance practices, making coverage more affordable, and implementing new care models that improve quality, reduce costs, and use integrated approaches to healthcare delivery.
As chronic disease is a key driver of healthcare costs and poor patient outcomes, this thesis will discuss the extent to which key provisions in the ACA can address the growing diabetes epidemic in America. The first chapter of this thesis lays the groundwork for the necessitation of healthcare reform and how rising healthcare costs and rates of the uninsured have further contributed to an already broken system. This analysis will discuss how the implementation of the ACA will attempt to address these problems. The second and third chapters will discuss specific provisions in the ACA that address diabetes prevention and treatment which, if fully scaled, have the potential to significantly reduce healthcare expenditures. This thesis will conclude that the implementation of the ACA has reduced the rates of the uninsured and has improved access to low-cost, preventive services that can improve the overall population health. This thesis will further conclude that additional research and refinement will be needed to understand if new healthcare delivery models can improve care for patients with diabetes while also reducing costs.
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Keywords
Affordable Care Act, Diabetes, Health Policy