What Are the Differences between Health Care Reform, Patient Protection, ACA, and ObamaCare?
What Are the Differences between Health Care Reform, Patient Protection, ACA, and ObamaCare? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Ashira Vantrees, JD of Aimed Alliance discusses the differences between Healthcare Reform, ObamaCare, Patient Protection and the ACA and how each impact patients differently.
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Transcript
Mary Leer:
What is the difference between the following things that most of us have heard about, the healthcare reform, the Affordable Care Act, Patient Protection and the ACA and ObamaCare?
Ashira Vantrees:
Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of terms that are used at the moment, when we’re talking about health care reform, our current health care system, so I think it’s important that we can break this down so we really understand exactly what we’re talking about. So first, the ACA. So the ACA stands for, the full bill name is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but it’s also been referred to as other names, so the Patient Protection and the ACA or ObamaCare, regardless of which name is used, when we use those words that we’re talking about, is that 2010 bill that was passed that created really important programs and protection for patients. And then when we talk about healthcare reform, what we’re talking about is really this larger issue of how we can really change and revise our healthcare system to address things like the increasing cost of healthcare, the number of people who are uninsured, or really the quality of care that we’re receiving and healthcare reform. I think it’s important to note that it can occur in a number of ways. So I think one of the biggest pieces of healthcare reform that we have in the last decade is the ACA, the Patient Protection, Affordable Care Act, and that came in the form of federal legislation, but we can also see health care reform come in through state legislation, so one way that we’re seeing healthcare reform now at a state level is through states passing laws to provide greater protection against burdensome prior authorization step therapy protocols, and requiring copay assistance to count towards meeting patients’ deductible and annual out of pocket limit.
