Table 2.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Title Description
I Focuses on insurance reform, and establishes access to discounted insurance exchanges in all states, covers children through the age of 26 on their parent’s insurance, and increases tax penalties both for individuals and businesses that do not have or provide insurance.
II Focuses on Medicaid and creates a guarantee of public or private insurance for lower-income individuals and families. It provides the choice of either public or private plans on the insurance exchanges and allows individuals without employer insurance of higher income to use the exchanges.
III Focuses on Medicare care delivery reform. It establishes a national quality strategy, endorses and invests in Accountable Care Organizations under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), creates incentives for preventing hospital infections and readmissions, establishes state and federal high-risk pools for insurable patients, and invests in Medicare hospital value-based purchasing. It also creates the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation where new delivery models are tested through public–private partnerships and challenge grants. This piece of the legislation creates and further develops Medicare’s quality measure and reporting programs as well as programs in comparative effectiveness research in quality of care, safety, and cost containment.
IV Focuses on prevention and outlines a national prevention strategy, the creation of the national prevention trust fund, a requirement that certain restaurants and vending machines provide nutrition information, and invests in state governments and work places to promote wellness in the work place.
V Focuses on health professions education grants and incentivizing primary care for physicians, nurses, and mid-level practitioners.
VI Focuses on fraud and abuse as well as nursing home transparency. This includes the Physician Sunshine Act that requires physicians to disclose all money received from pharmaceutical and device industries and creates a national database for this purpose.
VII Focuses on the FDA rules regarding biological or bio-similar drugs.
VIII Provides Americans with a new option to finance long-term care services in the event of a disability.
IX Relates to revenue, including a FICA tax on payroll that will help to paypartially for some of the new services associated with the ACA. In addition there will be new fines on businesses and individuals for lack of coverage.
RMMJ Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal Rambam Health Care Campus 2014 July; 5(3): e0017. ISSN: 2076-9172
Published online 2014 July 25. doi: 10.5041/RMMJ.10151