Health Insurance Coverage - Term Paper Example

In the absence of universal healthcare, which is the prevalent norm in neighboring Canada and other developed countries in Europe, the US faces peculiar problems in the delivery of healthcare services’ as the latter are provided in majority by the private insurance sector and employing agencies. President Barack Obama’s latest ‘Healthcare Reform Bill’ endeavors to bring healthcare services within access of the poorest sections’ of American society, and its provisions already claim that due to its enactment as Law, healthcare services will be available to 95% of the US population, at the same time unburdening the private companies from healthcare expenditure for employees’ insurance (Gabbatt, 2010).

Another reform, the ‘Young Adults and the Affordable Care Act’ has been aimed at unburdening families and businesses by allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ healthcare plans until the attainment of 26 years age (HHS, Web). In addition to the abovementioned national policies on healthcare, individual states are streamlining their healthcare infrastructures in order to make it more accessible to everyone through advances in information technology (IT) and state policies’. . Such exchanges are speculated to assist individuals and small employees in selecting tailor-made private health plans for individual needs from a single unified platform.

The State of Oregon has been awarded an amount of $ 48,096, 307 in order to facilitate the implementation of such an exchange which will cater to the 516,000 Medicaid clients and 277,000 commercial insurance consumers to enroll for health coverage according to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) (Irving, 2011). Similarly, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services now has access to $ 37, 757, 266 to implement an exchange which will assist state residents to access state based subsidized and non-subsidized health plans from a single platform.

The Wisconsin Health department anticipates that this Grant will allow it to make available such services to 35% of the State’s hitherto non served population comprising of 160,000 individuals in the non-group market, a million employees of small businesses, and 770,000 participants involved in the State’s BadgerCare Plus and Medicaid Programs (Irving, 2011). In Massachusetts, the University Medical School has been awarded a sum of $ 35.591,333 in order to facilitate an IT exchange which will cater to a multi-state consortium involving Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont, along with the parent state in making healthcare plans more accessible and individualized for the residents (Irving, 2011).

Voters in Oregon had already disapproved a movement to implement a Canadian-style universal healthcare plan being propositioned in 2003, fearing huge taxes and expressing mistrust in the bureaucracy, which would have assumed enormous powers in case a universal healthcare system had been implemented (Korcok, 2003).