Healthcare Made Easy


Book Description

An easy-to-understand guide to the Affordable Care Act! Written by ABC World News' Real Money expert and healthcare advocate Michelle Katz, Healthcare Made Easy is the ultimate resource for understanding and navigating the Affordable Care Act. Using simple and easy-to-follow language, she answers important questions about the ACA, such as: Are there any exemptions to buying insurance under the Affordable Care Act? What is the new "80/20 Rule"? And what exactly is the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program? What does the ACA mean for small businesses? What benefits must you offer and what are the tax breaks? What is covered for your children under the new CHIP laws? How can you get pharmaceutical companies to lower your prescription costs? With the expert advice in Healthcare Made Easy, you will learn how to get the most out of your healthcare plan without having to sacrifice your needs or empty your pockets. "Here is a guide, a map through the maze of healthcare decisions facing us all. Michelle has helped a lot of families. She is a champion of the consumer. A truly informed advocate." --Diane Sawyer "Michelle breaks down complicated laws and insurance regulations to make them understandable to everyone. She provides you with a road map to getting the best healthcare at the most affordable prices." --Tavis Smiley, Author, Television and Radio Host




Healthcare Reform Made Easy


Book Description

Healthcare Reform Made Easy for Employers and thier Employees An easy to read guide to understanding, implementing and complying with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act




Inside National Health Reform


Book Description

A guide to the Affordable Care Act, our new national health care law. An account of the process from the 2008 presidential campaign to the moment in 2010 when the bill was signed into law before anyone had a chance to digest the document. At a time when the nation is taking a second look at the ACA, "Inside National Health Reform" provides essential information for Americans to review the governmental processes and politics in enacting this legislation.




Navigating Healthcare Reform - E-Book


Book Description

Suddenly, dramatically, and seemingly overnight, U.S. healthcare has morphed into something virtually unrecognizable. There are a slew of new requirements, regulations, goals, buzzwords, and acronyms. It is a revolution in how we view the role and responsibilities not only of the physician and patient, but also of the nurse, the nurse practitioner, physical therapist, nutritionist, medical assistant, pharmacy technician, social worker, and other healthcare professionals. But you don’t just have to cope in this new world of healthcare. Now you can learn how to thrive amid all these changes and challenges. Written by the Chief Medical Officer of one of the world's leading global healthcare data and analytics companies, Navigating Healthcare Reform: An Insider’s Guide for Nurses and Allied Health Professionals is a compelling and easy-to-follow guide to understanding our unfolding healthcare reform — including its biobehavioral and psychosocial aspects — and learning how to take advantage of the opportunities it presents. Practical information is written expressly for nurses and allied health professionals to give you a straightforward understanding of this revolution, along with practical tips for how to survive and thrive in this new era of healthcare. Engaging style presents content using Dr. Edelstein's trademark easy-to-understand voice. Positive tone puts the politics aside and offers a uniquely hopeful message (one of challenges but also one of opportunity). Noteworthy quotes throughout the text help emphasize key takeaways. Vignettes within each chapter help to translate the content into real-life situations. Pearl boxes in the margins summarize critical points and knowledge that can be translated into your career. Engaging cartoons underscore the key messages of book in a fun, memorable manner.




Evidence-Based Medicine and the Changing Nature of Health Care


Book Description

Drawing on the work of the Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine, the 2007 IOM Annual Meeting assessed some of the rapidly occurring changes in health care related to new diagnostic and treatment tools, emerging genetic insights, the developments in information technology, and healthcare costs, and discussed the need for a stronger focus on evidence to ensure that the promise of scientific discovery and technological innovation is efficiently captured to provide the right care for the right patient at the right time. As new discoveries continue to expand the universe of medical interventions, treatments, and methods of care, the need for a more systematic approach to evidence development and application becomes increasingly critical. Without better information about the effectiveness of different treatment options, the resulting uncertainty can lead to the delivery of services that may be unnecessary, unproven, or even harmful. Improving the evidence-base for medicine holds great potential to increase the quality and efficiency of medical care. The Annual Meeting, held on October 8, 2007, brought together many of the nation's leading authorities on various aspects of the issues - both challenges and opportunities - to present their perspectives and engage in discussion with the IOM membership.




Health-Care Utilization as a Proxy in Disability Determination


Book Description

The Social Security Administration (SSA) administers two programs that provide benefits based on disability: the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program and the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This report analyzes health care utilizations as they relate to impairment severity and SSA's definition of disability. Health Care Utilization as a Proxy in Disability Determination identifies types of utilizations that might be good proxies for "listing-level" severity; that is, what represents an impairment, or combination of impairments, that are severe enough to prevent a person from doing any gainful activity, regardless of age, education, or work experience.




Care Without Coverage


Book Description

Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.




The Future of Nursing


Book Description

The Future of Nursing explores how nurses' roles, responsibilities, and education should change significantly to meet the increased demand for care that will be created by health care reform and to advance improvements in America's increasingly complex health system. At more than 3 million in number, nurses make up the single largest segment of the health care work force. They also spend the greatest amount of time in delivering patient care as a profession. Nurses therefore have valuable insights and unique abilities to contribute as partners with other health care professionals in improving the quality and safety of care as envisioned in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted this year. Nurses should be fully engaged with other health professionals and assume leadership roles in redesigning care in the United States. To ensure its members are well-prepared, the profession should institute residency training for nurses, increase the percentage of nurses who attain a bachelor's degree to 80 percent by 2020, and double the number who pursue doctorates. Furthermore, regulatory and institutional obstacles-including limits on nurses' scope of practice-should be removed so that the health system can reap the full benefit of nurses' training, skills, and knowledge in patient care. In this book, the Institute of Medicine makes recommendations for an action-oriented blueprint for the future of nursing.




Remedy and Reaction


Book Description

In no other country has health care served as such a volatile flashpoint of ideological conflict. America has endured a century of rancorous debate on health insurance, and despite the passage of legislation in 2010, the battle is not yet over. This book is a history of how and why the United States became so stubbornly different in health care, presented by an expert with unsurpassed knowledge of the issues. Tracing health-care reform from its beginnings to its current uncertain prospects, Paul Starr argues that the United States ensnared itself in a trap through policies that satisfied enough of the public and so enriched the health-care industry as to make the system difficult to change. He reveals the inside story of the rise and fall of the Clinton health plan in the early 1990sùand of the Gingrich counterrevolution that followed. And he explains the curious tale of how Mitt RomneyÆs reforms in Massachusetts became a model for Democrats and then follows both the passage of those reforms under Obama and the explosive reaction they elicited from conservatives. Writing concisely and with an even hand, the author offers exactly what is needed as the debate continuesùa penetrating account of how health care became such treacherous terrain in American politics.




American Healthcare Reform


Book Description

Meaningful healthcare reform requires understanding of our complex healthcare system. This book was written to help clarify the difficult and poorly understood issues and problems of American healthcare. Its purpose is to help us move forward on the many difficult decisions that should be made to improve our healthcare system. Our unique combination of public-private funding and free-market capitalism system has been a major source of medical care advancements over the last half-century. The entrepreneurial spirit of risk takers who have invested billions of dollars to push forward innovative ideas and products has been key to its success. We should not lose that driving force for medical advancements and our economy. Our American healthcare system needs reform. We should fix it rationally with a scalpel, not destroy it with a meat cleaver. To optimize and appropriately guide that reform, we should first understand and concentrate on the real problems. Primarily we should fix our healthcare system by decreasing its administrative complexity and inefficiencies. The Affordable Care Act should be modified significantly to make it more acceptable as part of our national effort for more meaningful reform. Rational solutions through political compromises are not easy to find in our highly polarized political environment. It will be a long uphill climb, but it is a challenge that we must meet for our uniquely American healthcare system to survive.