Allocating responsibility for health care decisions under the United States Affordable Care Act

• Autor(a) principal: Mariner, Wendy K.
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/105713
• topic: Health insurance; Health reform; United States; Obamacare; Affordable Care Act; Seguro de saúde; Reforma da saúde; Estados Unidos da América; Obamacare; Affordable Care Act

ABSTRACT - This article summarizes the major elements of the ACA’s insurance reforms and how they affect responsibility for making decisions about the health care that people receive. A key example of the difficulty of allocating decision making responsibility is the effort to define a minimum benefit package for insurance plans, called essential health benefits. While the ACA should achieve its goal of near-universal access to care, it leaves in place a multiplicity of processes and decision-makers for determining individual treatment. As a result, decisions about what care is provided are likely to remain, much as they are today, divided among government agencies, private insurers, private employers, and the courts.