Affordable Health Care in the United States
Affordable health care is a topic that will always be up for debate. With the growing cost of health care and health care coverage many are faced with the decision and financial burden of how they will be able to afford coverage. Health insurance is used to describe the program that was enacted to help with the cost of health care (Totic, 2015, p. 46). Health insurance is some-thing that is usually provided by an individual's employer, job-based benefits are typically Amer-icans primary route to health insurance protection (Blunberg, Buettgens, Feder & Holahan, 2012, p. 117). What about the individual's whose employers don't offer healthcare coverage or the in-dividual that is unemployed, or the self-employed worker. How will they pay for medical ex-penses, doctors’ visits, hospital stays, and prescriptions? “With the average hospital stay
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It does this by providing insurance for millions and making preventive care free (Yost 2016). This means people receive treatment before they need expensive emergency room services ACA requires all insurance plans to cover ten necessary health benefits. This includes treatment for mental health, addiction, and chronic diseases (Pollack, 2016, p. 442). Without these services, many patients wind up in the emergency room. Those costs are passed onto Medicaid, and therefore the tax-payer. Before ACA young adults over the age of 22 who were still under their parent insurance were kicked off. Many of whom are college students and have no other option to insurance cov-erage. ACA has allowed children to stay covered under their parent's insurance until the age of 26. “As of 2012, more than three million previously uninsured young people were added and in-creased coverage raised overall health care costs in the short-term” (Pollack, 2016, p. 546). That is because many people received preventive care and