The Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA) are the two critical documents that changed the healthcare system in the United States at the beginning of the 2000s. In the initial post, the author focused on the common policy-making aspects of both Acts, neglecting the peculiarities of each proposal separately. Therefore, such questions as the similarities and differences of policy-making in the ACA and the HCERA should be additionally addressed.
The progress of the chosen Acts was evident during the last decade. However, some of their parts were repealed, while others were not implemented in the way it was expected (Levy et al., 2020). Therefore, such facts as Trump’s sabotage campaign and the votes to undermine the already existing law have to be added to the discussion (McIntyre & Song, 2019). The analysis of terminated funding for cost-sharing reductions are required (McIntyre & Song, 2019). The main idea of the policy, which is the provision of equal health coverage, faces certain challenges that cannot be ignored in the evaluation of policy-making processes. These are the reasons to continue investigating the policy and its impact on the government, the citizens, the healthcare system, and the country in general.
In fact, there are no crucial mistakes in the initial post because the conditions under which the ACA and the HCERA were created were not simple. Some politicians and policy-makers believed that they did the best option for their country and patients. However, there will always be some opponents who discover the shortages of the process and recognize failures over successes. As a result, the policy under analysis can be neither purely bad nor good, but its components have to be thoroughly investigated in the future.
References
Levy, H., Ying, A., & Bagley, N. (2020). What’s left of the Affordable Care Act? A progress report. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 6(2), 42-66. Web.
McIntyre, A., & Song, Z. (2019). The US Affordable Care Act: Reflections and directions at the close of a decade. PLoS Medicine, 16(2). Web.