Affordable Healthcare Act

Introduction

The Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) was enacted in March, 2010 (Healthcare.gov, n.d.) to increase the availability of healthcare to Americans. Several changes have been made to the law in recent years, and as recently as 2021 adjustments were made to the provisions of the ACA (Andrews, 2021). In this capstone paper you will analyze the impact of the law on expenditures for health care. (How did this act change/affect the amount spent on healthcare?)

Activity Instructions

Using the concepts, you have learned in this class, up to and including this week, analyze the law and potential changes on health care expenditures in the United States from the time before the Affordable Health Care Act was passed to the present time. Also compare the changes in expenditures on health care if a single-payer plan was adopted.

Among other concepts that you can utilize in your analysis, you may consider the supply and demand in the healthcare market (both on the output market and on the input markets), elasticity, Economies of Scale and Scope, incentives facing the market participants, the role that preventative medicine may have, moral hazard and adverse selection issues, availability of insurance, as well as any other concepts from the course that you find relevant.

Writing and Submission Requirements

 6-8 pages (approx. 300 words per page), not including title page or references page

 References page (minimum of 5 resources)

Tips for Success

Note several items from the prompt: first, this is asking about healthcare expenditures, NOT about expenditures on insurance (although insurance may be something that affects healthcare expenditures). Second, this is not asking what your opinions of the law are, rather on the effects. Regardless of whether you’re entirely in favor or entirely against the ACA, if you were affected by the law (say you were in the HR department of a business or in the medical industry) you would have to follow the law regardless of your opinions.

You could think about your audience for the paper as either the public who is interested in the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare or a hospital or other entity in the medical industry who would like to know what the effects on their revenues and costs will be given the new law.