The ACA Toolbox for Healthcare Reform

Courtesy of the Commonwealth Fund

In their blog post “The ACA Toolbox for Health Reform: What State Health Leaders Aren’t Telling the General Assembly,”  The Ruoff Group points out that health care coverage expansion is integral to meet cost effectiveness and improve healthcare, not contrary to them, as SC’s Director of Health and Human Services, Tony Keck, is telling the General Assembly.

What Director Keck should be asking is this: How do we get as many people as we can healthy in the United States?

In response, The Commonwealth Fund used the toolbox graphic at right to show how the Affordable Care Act helps move us towards the needed changes to the health care system to achieve Keck’s stated goals.

Essentially, the Affordable Care Act is a toolbox loaded with tools for stabilizing health spending and moving us toward a high performance health care system.

The Ruoff Group makes an excellent point:

We can have honest differences over whether South Carolina can afford it’s four percent contribution to a Medicaid Expansion between FY2014 and FY2020. But the state’s chief health policy officer completely mischaracterizing the ACA to the General Assembly can only lead us to bad policy choices on the expansion.