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Obama Care and the Expansion of Healthcare Outsourcing


It has been almost 6 years since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) or popularly known Obamacare has been signed in the United States.

The idea of the health bill is to make quality health insurance affordable for everyone through consumer protections, regulations, subsidies, taxes, insurance exchanges, and other reforms. It has required even small scale companies to provide health insurance for their employees. Companies that won’t be able to provide healthcare insurance for their full-time employees will be penalized. It has also expanded the coverage of Medicare and Medicaid.

Through the development of the bill, a lot of other benefits and protection have been added to the already long list of advantages of the health care bill. This includes amendments which make it illegal to charge for pre-existing health conditions and prevents discrimination. It has also required insurance companies to provide a short, plain-language summary of coverage and benefits but most of all, it has created a Marketplace for private health insurance companies to compete fairly though the standardizing the minimum coverage and developing a body that will monitor the insurance companies.

Paying close attention to the even ground that the Marketplace has created, health insurance companies now have to win the favor of the public so they can profit. This will put pressure on them since they will be forced to handle a huge increase in the demand on medical and pharmaceutical services. In the 2014 open enrolment alone, 8 million enrolled in the Marketplace. An estimated of 11.7 million are projected to have enrolled in the 2015 open enrollment and the numbers are only expected increase this year. Now that more people have easier access to health services, there will be a need for them to bolster their services. This trend has turned outsourcing into a valuable solution for them.

Outsourcing has provided health insurance companies with the necessary help to adjust to the increasing demand that ACA has created. Since the current international trade regulatory regime does not stand in the way of enterprises moving jobs around to obtain skills anywhere, offshore outsourcing has become a very economical solution for health insurance companies. Although this could widen the gap between U.S. labor costs and foreign labor costs, outsourcing can give a quick solution for center services; back offices; medical, legal and other data transcription and coding; animation; software development; engineering design; and digital content. This will not just save them production expenses but will also cut the time necessary to transition to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act era of healthcare insurance.

Most of the major provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have phased in last January 2014. As of the moment, there are still provisions that need to be completed until the year of 2020 and with the US presidential election on the peak of its heat, there are chances that more reforms on healthcare will be put into discussion and will hence continue to shape the industry of outsourcing.

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