Health Insurance: Specific Purposes and Current Status in the US

The Financing of Health Care in the United States (U.S.)
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The Financing of Health Care in the United States (U.S.)
Introduction
The nationwide discussion over the role of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) entails substantial debate about the impact of health insurance on populations’ health outcomes. It is anticipated that replacing Obamacare might undermine the capacity of millions of Americans to access medical coverage. In political contexts, there have been debates that lack of health care access does not lead to undesirable health outcomes, such as death. Nevertheless, it is increasingly challenging to assess the effect of medical insurance on populations’ wellbeing, and treatment outcomes as such indicators take extended timescales to establish and are, in most instances, laden with confounding factors. This is because changes in medical coverage are often linked to other contextual factors that also impact medical care utilization and outcomes. This paper discusses the purpose of medical insurance, the current medical insurance landscape in the U.S., and the impact of medical insurance coverage on health care usage, illness treatment and outcomes, self-reported health, and mortality.
Purpose of Health Insurance
One of the primary roles of medical insurance is to attain financial risk management goals. There are instances where health insurance is attributed to improvements in financial security. For example, the Oregon Health Insurance experiment indicated that people covered under Medicaid recorded substantial gains in financial health for the uninsured – accounting for a $390 average drop in the invoiced medical bills and eliminating the rising out-of-pocket costs virtually (Sommers et al., 2017). In addition, the health insurance expansion programs such as Massachusetts’ 2006 care delivery reforms, the 2014 ACA Medicaid expansion, and the 2010 “dependent-coverage provision” of ACA increasing the age of household dependents coverage to 26, are attributed to similar shifts (Sommers et al., 2017). The interventionist plans are attributed to the reduced collection of medical bills and bankruptcies, thus reiterating the role of medical insurance in reducing the risk of burgeoning health care expenses in the U.S.
Health insurance also acts as a social reform initiative and a tool to realize specific government priorities of enhancing health and public health outcomes. Medical insurance programs can be conceptualized differently from other kinds of insurance, from a policy perspective, for example, renters’ or universal homeowners’ insurance incentivized by the U.S. government. The rationale for this difference provides an avenue to understand the purpose of health insurance. First, policymakers conceptualize medical insurance via government subsidized care services as a crucial social safety net that reduces health disparities by broadly redistributing resources to traditionally disadvantaged populations. Second, health insurance is an effective tool for realizing specific government policy priorities, including better medical care and overall public health outcomes (Sommers et...