Discussion: Mandated health insurance coverage

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) requires that U.S. citizens and legal residents obtain qualifying health coverage. Write a report of 4-5 pages that explores the individual mandate section of this health reform law and how current legislation impacts this. Complete the following:

Explain the individual mandate included in the PPACA including the tax penalties imposed if a person or family had not obtained qualifying health coverage.

How has mandated health insurance coverage under PPACA worked? What impacted its success? If you were required to make one policy change or enhancement to ensure success of an individual mandate such as included in the PPACA, what would you recommend?

Assess the historical relationship between the cost of health care and outcomes in the United States with the cost of health care and outcomes in another country. What policies could be considered to assist in changing the relationship between costs and outcomes to a more efficient relationship in the United States, if at all?

Note: Your report should use APA formatting, and you must include 4 references, 2 of which are peer-reviewed sources from health care journals and published within the last 5 years.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument