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Healthcare, the Affordable Care Act, and Request for Proposals
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From the moment President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (ACA), there has been significant media coverage, contentious debate, and widespread public confusion. There are numerous misconceptions about what the ACA does and does not do and the short and long-term effects of its enactment. There have been misunderstandings that the ACA will give undocumented immigrants health insurance or that it would create so-called “death panels,” a term coined by former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. The argument was later discredited, but Palin claimed that bureaucrats would decide whether sick and elderly Americans were entitled to health care or not.
The individual mandate as part of the law that requires every American to buy insurance has been a sore spot for many, even prompting a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. The provision of the law was upheld and despite countless attempts in Congress to defund and illegalize the ACA, it has remained the law of the land. In a recent article, the New York Times reports that the law has made significant progress thus far in reducing the number of uninsured Americans by twenty-five percent, opening up coverage options to people with pre-existing conditions, and making health care more affordable, especially among low-income people who qualify for government subsidies.
Despite predictions that the ACA would cripple private enterprise of the health care system, the so-called “government takeover” has increased business with more people buying insurance and receiving care. In fact, the aforementioned New York Times article also reported that the S&P 500 Health Care Index, a stock market measure of business success among health insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies rose by 24 percent in 2013, a higher rise than the stock market overall.
As a result of ACA policies and advancements in the American health care system, there has been a new and growing influx of federal, state, and local government contracts into the marketplace that are related to the ACA. Since the ACA has many implications for governments and businesses of all levels, these ACA-related contracts and RFPs request a broad array of services from healthcare workers to auditing, financial, and consulting professionals. Businesses interested in this abundance of contracts must look no further than Find RFP to be able to sort through ACA-related contracts and find opportunities of interest.
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Read more Blogs on Government RFP, Bid, Contract and Notice
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