Health Care Policy

Health Care Policy

Healthcare policies are plans, decisions, and actions undertaken by healthcare organizations and all the stakeholders to achieve specific healthcare objectives. Healthcare policies are designed to enhance operational processes to achieve high quality of care. Healthcare policies shape the entire healthcare industry, including the providers, patients, and all the stakeholders. Nurse practitioners, policymakers, patients, and governments play essential roles in implementing, shaping, and assessing healthcare policies within the communities and healthcare organizations. Further, developing and implementing healthcare policies requires a foundational understanding of different aspects of healthcare systems.

Healthcare policies are essential in enhancing the establishment of guidelines that are beneficial to patients, healthcare systems, and healthcare organizations. They provide protocols that help in reducing poor communication during decision-making processes (Porche, 2021). The policies can provide guidelines in reducing medication errors and enhancing overall operational processes within a healthcare organization. Healthcare policies often come with regulations that ensure the delivery of quality care to patients. For instance, regulations on the limitation of errors in the process of care are critical in ensuring the delivery of quality care to patients. Healthcare policies provide standardization that ensures the delivery of quality care to all patients engaged in the treatment processes. With appropriate healthcare policies in place, healthcare professionals are able to deal with issues and activities that are critical to patients’ safety during patient care.

Healthcare policies often enhance the provision of strategies to provide cost-effective quality care. In other words, there are policies that aim at controlling the cost of general healthcare and specific services delivered to patients in the course of treatment. As advocates for patient care, nurse leaders are able to develop policies that reduce medication errors that often lead to the increased cost of healthcare services (Lewiecki et al., 2019). Nurse leaders can also advocate for the reduction in the cost of medication and the general healthcare delivery process.

References

Lewiecki, E. M., Ortendahl, J. D., Vanderpuye‐Orgle, J., Grauer, A., Arellano, J., Lemay, J., …& Singer, A. J. (2019). Healthcare policy changes in osteoporosis can improve outcomes and reduce costs in the United States. JBMR plus, 3(9), e10192. https://doi.org/10.1002/jbm4.10192

Porche, D. J. (2021). Health policy: Application for nurses and other healthcare professionals. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

 

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The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has subsidies, which are tax credits that are given on a sliding scale to individuals whose net income ranges between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level (FPL). The subsidies help to reduce the health insurance premium costs to individuals who may struggle to pay for health insurance (Liu et al., 2021). The subsidies come in two primary forms including the cost sharing reduction and premium tax credits subsidies. The most predominant ACA subsidy is the Medicaid. There are different criteria that are needed for one to qualify for ACA subsidies. One must be a citizen of US or legal resident, living in America currently, and not serving jail term. Households with income of between 100% and 400% FPL are also eligible for the subsidies.

According to Frean et al. (2017), ACA subsidies differ from Medicaid in several ways. In terms of coverage plans, Medicaid program is a government initiative provided to people and families earning low incomes, ACA subsidies are provided by the private insurance organizations. Concerning the beneficiaries of the programs, the Medicaid program strives to provide health insurance coverage to the older adults who are 65 years and above and the younger individuals with certain disabilities. On the other hand, the ACA subsidies seek to ensure that every citizen attains affordable health insurance coverage without considering the economic or social background. Moreover, Medicaid is given by the government to the eligible beneficiaries while ACA subsidies are purchased by individuals from the private companies that deal in health insurance.

References

Frean, M., Gruber, J., & Sommers, B. D. (2017). Premium subsidies, the mandate, and Medicaid expansion: Coverage effects of the Affordable Care Act. Journal of Health Economics, 53, 72-86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2017.02.004

Liu, C., Gotanda, H., Khullar, D., Rice, T., & Tsugawa, Y. (2021). The Affordable Care Act’s Insurance Marketplace Subsidies Were Associated With Reduced Financial Burden For US Adults: Study examines the ACA’s insurance marketplace subsidies and financial burden on US adults. Health Affairs, 40(3), 496-504. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.01106

Lopes Write Policy

For assignments that need to be submitted to Lopes Write, please be sure you have received your report and Similarity Index (SI) percentage BEFORE you do a “final submit” to me.

Once you have received your report, please review it. This report will show you grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors that can easily be fixed. Take the extra few minutes to review instead of getting counted off for these mistakes.

Review your similarities. Did you forget to cite something? Did you not paraphrase well enough? Is your paper made up of someone else’s thoughts more than your own?

Visit the Writing Center in the Student Success Center, under the Resources tab in LoudCloud for tips on improving your paper and SI score.

Late Policy

The university’s policy on late assignments is 10% penalty PER DAY LATE. This also applies to late DQ replies.

Please communicate with me if you anticipate having to submit an assignment late. I am happy to be flexible, with advance notice. We may be able to work out an extension based on extenuating circumstances.

If you do not communicate with me before submitting an assignment late, the GCU late policy will be in effect.

I do not accept assignments that are two or more weeks late unless we have worked out an extension.

As per policy, no assignments are accepted after the last day of class. Any assignment submitted after midnight on the last day of class will not be accepted for grading.

Communication

Communication is so very important. There are multiple ways to communicate with me:

Questions to Instructor Forum: This is a great place to ask course content or assignment questions. If you have a question, there is a good chance one of your peers does as well. This is a public forum for the class.

Individual Forum: This is a private forum to ask me questions or send me messages. This will be checked at least once every 24 hours.

Important information for writing discussion questions and participation

Welcome to class

Hello class and welcome to the class and I will be your instructor for this course. This is a -week course and requires a lot of time commitment, organization, and a high level of dedication. Please use the class syllabus to guide you through all the assignments required for the course. I have also attached the classroom policies to this announcement to know your expectations for this course. Please review this document carefully and ask me any questions if you do. You could email me at any time or send me a message via the “message” icon in halo if you need to contact me. I check my email regularly, so you should get a response within 24 hours. If you have not heard from me within 24 hours and need to contact me urgently, please send a follow up text to

I strongly encourage that you do not wait until the very last minute to complete your assignments. Your assignments in weeks 4 and 5 require early planning as you would need to present a teaching plan and interview a community health provider. I advise you look at the requirements for these assignments at the beginning of the course and plan accordingly. I have posted the YouTube link that explains all the class assignments in detail. It is required that you watch this 32-minute video as the assignments from week 3 through 5 require that you follow the instructions to the letter to succeed. Failure to complete these assignments according to instructions might lead to a zero. After watching the video, please schedule a one-on-one with me to discuss your topic for your project by the second week of class. Use this link to schedule a 15-minute session. Please, call me at the time of your appointment on my number. Please note that I will NOT call you.

Please, be advised I do NOT accept any assignments by email. If you are having technical issues with uploading an assignment, contact the technical department and inform me of the issue. If you have any issues that would prevent you from getting your assignments to me by the deadline, please inform me to request a possible extension. Note that working fulltime or overtime is no excuse for late assignments. There is a 5%-point deduction for every day your assignment is late. This only applies to approved extensions. Late assignments will not be accepted.

If you think you would be needing accommodations due to any reasons, please contact the appropriate department to request accommodations.

Plagiarism is highly prohibited. Please ensure you are citing your sources correctly using APA 7th edition. All assignments including discussion posts should be formatted in APA with the appropriate spacing, font, margin, and indents. Any papers not well formatted would be returned back to you, hence, I advise you review APA formatting style. I have attached a sample paper in APA format and will also post sample discussion responses in subsequent announcements.

Your initial discussion post should be a minimum of 200 words and response posts should be a minimum of 150 words. Be advised that I grade based on quality and not necessarily the number of words you post. A minimum of TWO references should be used for your initial post. For your response post, you do not need references as personal experiences would count as response posts. If you however cite anything from the literature for your response post, it is required that you cite your reference. You should include a minimum of THREE references for papers in this course. Please note that references should be no more than 5 years old except recommended as a resource for the class. Furthermore, for each discussion board question, you need ONE initial substantive response and TWO substantive responses to either your classmates or your instructor for a total of THREE responses. There are TWO discussion questions each week, hence, you need a total minimum of SIX discussion posts for each week. I usually post a discussion question each week. You could also respond to these as it would count towards your required SIX discussion posts for the week.

I understand this is a lot of information to cover in 5 weeks, however, the Bible says in Philippians 4:13 that we can do all things through Christ that strengthens us. Even in times like this, we are encouraged by God’s word that we have that ability in us to succeed with His strength. I pray that each and every one of you receives strength for this course and life generally as we navigate through this pandemic that is shaking our world today. Relax and enjoy the course!

Hi Class,

Please read through the following information on writing a Discussion question response and participation posts.

Contact me if you have any questions.

Important information on Writing a Discussion Question

• Your response needs to be a minimum of 150 words (not including your list of references)
• There needs to be at least TWO references with ONE being a peer reviewed professional journal article.
• Include in-text citations in your response
• Do not include quotes—instead summarize and paraphrase the information
• Follow APA-7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed

Participation –replies to your classmates or instructor

• A minimum of 6 responses per week, on at least 3 days of the week.
• Each response needs at least ONE reference with citations—best if it is a peer reviewed journal article
• Each response needs to be at least 75 words in length (does not include your list of references)
• Responses need to be substantive by bringing information to the discussion or further enhance the discussion. Responses of “I agree” or “great post” does not count for the word count.
• Follow APA 7th edition
• Points will be deducted if the above is not followed
• Remember to use and follow APA-7th edition for all weekly assignments, discussion questions, and participation points.
• Here are some helpful links
• Student paper example
• Citing Sources
• The Writing Center is a great resource