Health Care Reform Simplified: Guide Your Family and Your Business through Health Care Reform

Health Care Reform Simplified: Guide Your Family and Your Business through Health Care Reform Review

Health Care Reform Simplified describes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. It translates the law’s complex language into terms that are easy to understand, explaining what the new law does, when its provisions take effect, and how to plan for individual, family, and business health coverage. This book outlines the financial impact of the law and how it affects businesses, insurers, hospitals, and doctors.

Most important, this book gives consumers and employers the critical information for making informed choices about new options for private and public health insurance coverage. It also describes how the law interacts with Medicare and Medicaid. Finally, it looks at the potential roadblocks—political and judicial, as well as economic—that may derail some of the provisions. But with nearly half the Act's provisions in force already, there is no time to lose in understanding how this legislation affects U.S. health care providers and consumers today.

• Explains health reform in easy-to-understand terms
• Provides guidance on options for anyone buying health insurance, whether for family or employees
• Details the impact on businesses, medical professionals, and insurers 
• Charts the potential impact of political opposition to the act
• Explains who will pay for reform and where the cost savings lie—under both best and worst scenarios

What you’ll learn

• The provisions of the new health care law.
• The options for families and individuals, and how to decide whether to keep existing insurance, switch to a different plan, or get new coverage at an exchange or co-op
• The mandates for having insurance coverage and the penalties for failing to comply
• New government subsidies and tax breaks for health care, and who qualifies for them
• Options for businesses, and how employers can decide whether to keep existing plans, purchase plans through exchanges, or provide vouchers to employees
• The impact of health care reform on hospitals, doctors, insurers, and patient care
• The roadblocks and potholes on the way to reform and how the law may change in the years to come

Who this book is for

Health Care Reform Simplified is an excellent resource for people who make health care decisions for their families, or for managers who make decisions about insurance coverage for employees. Health care professionals and those working in the insurance industry will also find it a useful overview of the changes that have occurred and those yet to come.

Table of Contents

1. Overview: Health Care Reform Past and Future
2. Early Changes: Health Care Reform's First Ups, Downs
3. New Choices: Individual, Family Insurance Options 
4. Business Trends: Tackling Taxes, Mandates, Incentives
5. Insurance Shift: Law Changes Market Rules, Regulations 
6. New Medicine: Law Attacks Errors and Inefficiencies
7. Medi-Growth: Medicaid, Medicare Poised to Expand
8. Info Overload: Law Brings Communication Challenges
9. Who Pays? Health Care Reform to Cost .4 Trillion 
10. War on Reform: New Law Faces Legal, Political Attacks