You should respond to your peers by extending, refuting/correcting, or adding additional nuance to their posts. All replies must be constructive and use literature where possible.Nicole Denise WilsonACA Components Over the past several decades, there has been an incremental trend in health care costs. Economic issues play a crucial role in making decisions on health care. Health insurance companies provide a means through which people can meet their health costs and needs. Health policies or programs are aimed at improving access to affordable and quality health care services. These policies are decisions, plans, and actions placed in a society or community to help its people attain health objectives. Additionally, health care policies directly affect the costs that citizens must pay to access quality services. Therefore, a health policy determines people’s health in a given locality. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a comprehensive health reform plan meant to increase health insurance coverage, improve health care quality, and control costs. Cherry and Jacob (2016) assert that the ACA policy has components with a tremendous positive potentiality of reducing health costs and improving healthcare quality.President Barrack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, also referred to as Obamacare, into law on 23rd March 2010. The bill’s primary goals are to extend health insurance access, support incentive care provisions, and extend Medicaid coverage to all adults (Serakos & Wolfe, 2016). One of the ACA’s components with potential positive impacts is the extension of dependents' age to 26 years (Cherry & Jacob, 2016). This implies that young adults below 26 years old are covered by their parents' or guardian’s policies, increasing the number of insured individuals and Obamacare's greatest strength. Zhao et al. (2020) state that when people are insured, they can access quality care to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases promptly. Additionally, insured individuals can access palliative services, improving disease outcomes.According to Cherry and Jacob (2016), ACA requires that U.S. legal residents and citizens be covered under health insurance or otherwise pay penalties. This component increases the number of insured individuals, accruing the nation’s health benefits. A report released by Rapfogel et al. (2020) indicates that more than 20 million Americans have gained insurance coverage, reducing the ratio of uninsured individuals. Furthermore, ACA has narrowed the coverage disparities between ethnicities and races.Medical underwriting refers to the practice whereby health insurers use an applicant’s history to decide on whether to insure them or not. Through this practice, insurance companies can deny people with preexisting conditions coverage or charge them higher premiums. Before 2010, people with prior existing conditions were discriminated against by insurance companies. However, ACA inception changed this scenario. French et al. (2016) state that ACA bars companies from charging people with preexisting conditions higher premiums or denying them coverage. Another crucial protection offered by ACA on people with preexisting conditions is the requirement that they should be included in the essential health benefits such as prescription drugs, behavioral health, and maternity care (Rapfogel et al. 2020). Additionally, the legislation bans insurance plans from placing limits on the lifetime or annual benefits (Cherry & Jacob, 2016). Limits on benefits had previously stopped countless sickest individuals from gaining access to the necessary health care due to financial constraints, predisposing them to catastrophic health outcomes.ACA will reduce health costs in two ways. By lowering the out-of-pocket cash for paying for health services and by giving more emphasis on preventive services. ACA provides community and public health agencies with funds for primary preventive programs, shifting the focus from disease treatment. This effort will improve the population's general health, saving funds that would have otherwise been used to meet a sick nation's health demands. ACA has been and will continue being a savior of thousands of Americans, changing the lives of people with low incomes, the previously uninsured, the disabled, those with preexisting conditions, and the minority groups.ReferencesCherry, B., & Jacob, S. R. (2016). Contemporary nursing: Issues, trends, & management. Elsevier Health Sciences.French, M. T., Homer, J., Gumus, G., & Hickling, L. (2016). Key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA): a systematic review and presentation of early research findings. Health services research, 51(5), 1735-1771.Rapfogel, N., Gee, E., & Calsyn, M. (2020). 10 Ways the ACA Has Improved Health Care in the Past Decade. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2020/03/23/482012/10-ways-aca-improved-health-care-past-decade/ (Links to an external site.)Serakos, M., & Wolfe, B. (2016). The ACA: Impacts on Health, Access, and Employment. Forum for health economics & policy, 19(2), 201–259. https://doi.org/10.1515/fhep-2015-0027 (Links to an external site.)Zhao, J., Mao, Z., Fedewa, S. A., Nogueira, L., Yabroff, K. R., Jemal, A., & Han, X. (2020). The Affordable Care Act and access to care across the cancer control continuum: A review at 10 years. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. ReplyReply to Comment