Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has made majority of American citizens to gain insurance coverage and reduced preventive care. There is significant need on gaining the understanding on how the affordable care act changes will impact health outcomes and the use of preventive care services (Sommers et al., 2012). However, it is challenging to find out the inherent difference between the uninsured and the insured individuals. For this case, qauasi experimental approaches will be used to address the problem including regression discontinuity, RCTs, and differences-in-differences analysis. In each case, the assumptions of the underlying models will be discussed together with the main findings of the research related to health and prevention. The review will conclude the discussions of how quasi-experimental and experiment methods can be used to study how health outcomes and preventive care are impacted by the Affordable Care Act (Sommers et al., 2014).

Natural experiments are +used in Quasi-experimental analyses to identify variation sources that are plausibly unrelated to the outcomes under study, in this case health and preventive care outcomes. In health insurance natural experiments originates from changes in coverage policy. Strict cutoffs are used to determine eligibility in terms of age and income or differences in coverage across all people and groups. Although natural experiments are study using different methods, the two most common that will be used in the study is regression discontinuity (RD) and differences-in-differences analysis (DD) (Sommers et al., 2012)

For this study, the causal effects of healthcare outcomes and preventive care would be assigned randomly to some random individuals while others will remained unused and hence the control of the experiment and be given alternative coverage. These methods will allow for the comparison the use of health outcomes and preventive care across the study groups. One group will be the treatment group while another group will be the control group without selection bias (Sommers et al., 2014).

References

Sommers, B. D., Long, S. K., & Baicker, K. (January 01, 2014). Changes in mortality after Massachusetts health care reform: a quasi-experimental study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 160, 9, 585-93.

Sommers, B. D., Wilson, L., & United States. (2012). Fifty-four million additional Americans are receiving preventive services coverage without cost-sharing under the Affordable Care Act. Washington, D.C: Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Office of Human Services Policy, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.