NUR 500: The Affordable Care Act's Impact on Healthcare Providers

This essay analyzes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), examining its impact on healthcare providers, including nurses and doctors. The ACA aimed to provide affordable healthcare to all US citizens, but it led to workforce shortages due to increased patient numbers with a limited increase in healthcare professionals. The essay discusses the increase in work overload, reduced quality of patient care, and government involvement in the patient-provider relationship. It highlights wasteful healthcare spending, such as defensive medicine and overtreatment, which adds significant costs without improving patient health. The author suggests enacting laws to ensure healthcare professionals focus on necessary care and informing the public about lawsuits when benefits are outweighed by harm, emphasizing the need for quality, safe, and cost-effective healthcare.

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(Author’s name)
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The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act 2014, was developed and enacted
to law in order to allow all citizens of the United States have access to quality, affordable health
care, and will lead to creation of a health care system that will use only the required and
necessary cost ("The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", 2014). This Act consist of
three major components or goals which include ensuring that more than 94% of people have
affordable health insurance, ensure all Americans have quality and affordable care and reduce
health care cost by minimizing the deficits by around 118 billion dollars over the next decade
and even more in the following years ("The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", 2014).
These components are subdivided into other major objectives which include the roles of the
public programs, quality and affordable care for all citizens, enhancing efficiency and quality
care of health, prevention of chronic diseases and enhancing public health, health care
workforce, program integrity and transparency, maximizing access to innovative medical
interventions, and revenue provisions ("The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", 2014).
However, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has led to various impacts on
health care providers including nurses and doctors(Shaw, Asomugha, Conway, & Rein, 2014).
With current situations, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has led to an increase in a
healthcare workforce shortage. The Act increased the number of people with health insurance
which has led to an increase in number with both outpatient and inpatient clients with same or
little increase in a number of nurses and doctors employed(Shaw et al., 2014). Due to this,
nursing and medicine have been stressful due to work overload. Other than that, the quality of
patient care in both nursing and medicine have reduced as there is limited time with patients and
the government has been involved in the patient-provider relationship.

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One example of healthcare spending that has no or little benefit is defensive medicine
costs and overtreatment. Overtreatment healthcare spending comes when healthcare providers
are driven by patients and their preferences rather that than those that are guided by evidence-
based practices and for the provision of optimum care. In 2011, such treatment added a wasteful
cost of around 226 billion dollars (Lallemand, 2013). Overtreatment costs are normally
experienced where patients prefer certain drugs that are costlier over the other having in mind the
effects are similar. In defensive medicine, health care providers often perform unnecessary
diagnostic procedures or tests to guard themselves against liability of malpractice lawsuits. In
2010, Harvard University performed research that demonstrated that there were about 56 billion
dollars used in 2008, accounting for 2.4% of all health care budget on healthcare liability and
defensive medicine costs (Lallemand, 2013). Such healthcare spending has minimal or no effect
on the health of individuals. The government should enact laws that allow healthcare
professionals to perform only what is required to the patients but not what they desire or wants
(Sahni, Chigurupati, Kocher, MD & Cutler, 2015).
In conclusion, healthcare should be directed towards maintaining quality and safe care
not expensive and unnecessary care. The public should be informed to place lawsuits where
harm outweighed benefits but not when they feel certain things were not done onto them.

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References
Lallemand, N. (2013). Reducing Waste in Health Care | Health Affairs. Retrieved from
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20121213.959735/full/
Shaw, F. E., Asomugha, C. N., Conway, P. H., & Rein, A. S. (2014). The patient protection and
affordable care act: Opportunities for prevention and public health. The Lancet.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)60259-2
Sahni, N., Chigurupati, A., Kocher, MD, B., & Cutler, D. (2015). How the U.S. Can Reduce
Waste in Health Care Spending by $1 Trillion. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-
the-u-s-can-reduce-waste-in-health-care-spending-by-1-trillion
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (2014). Retrieved from
https://www.dpc.senate.gov/healthreformbill/healthbill52.pdf