Health Care Reform Advocacy Essay

The current fee-for-service system has which generates practitioners’ interest in providing more services no matter whether they are valuable for the patient outcome or not. It is important to shift the emphasis to the quality of health care services from their amount, emphasizing their value instead of volume. The interest groups including the health care workers, legislators, and patients, agree that finding the ways for handling this problem is important for reorganizing and improving the whole health care system by creating appropriate conditions for medical practitioners and increasing the customers’ satisfaction.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 along with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 offered measures for changing the Medicare principles and the system of practitioners’ reimbursements. Thus, sections 3201 and 3203 of the Affordable Care Act, for instance, offer using academic institutions, best statistical methods and innovative technology for properly analyzing the reimbursement information and developing the fee strategies (HR 3590, p. 2055).

The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act defines the term of primary care and the amount of payment for the services (HR 4872, p. 24). Though these measures which were imposed on the state level had an impact on the local institutions, the reformation process is time-taking. It is important to develop more detailed descriptions of the procedures at this intermediate stage when the old fee-for-service system is already left in the past but the transition to a new value-focused philosophy is not completed yet.

The solution of the problem of balancing the principles of Medicare, practitioners’ reimbursements, and the quality of the health care services requires developing strategies for collecting and evaluating the information and controlling the implementation of the plans at the local level for minimizing the risk of shifting the burden on the patients and especially seniors as one of the major risk categories.

Reference List

HR 3590. 111^th Congress 2^nd Session. Democrats Senate Website. Web.

HR 4872. 111^th Congress 2^nd Session. The Library of Congress Thomas Website. Web.