Affordable Care Act good for patients, hospitals

By Ann Byrne, Renae Council and Pauline Taylor

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We are nurses from University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Among us we have

78 years of experience treating thousands of patients - young and old, rich and poor, male and female.

We have seen firsthand the problems that having

50 million uninsured Americans can cause - from bankruptcies because of capped medical expense coverage to stress so intense families sometimes don't survive intact after a major medical event.

That is why during National Nurses Week this past week, we have been working hard to educate our caring colleagues about the Affordable Care Act, the fate of which is now in the hands of the nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

Partisan politics around the issue has muddied the waters, even among health care providers, when it comes to knowing what is really in or not in the law.

We have observed, however, that once health care professionals understand how critical the ACA is for our patients, they quickly become advocates for the quality, accessible, affordable care that will be widely available when the reform law is fully implemented.

If the law is weakened or overturned, our jobs become harder and our patients' health is jeopardized. We are back to where we started with insurance companies, not patients, calling the shots.

The ACA will:

l Require insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions and cannot cap lifetime benefits.

l Ensure young adults up to age 26 can gain coverage through their parent's plans. Already 18,012 Iowans are covered under this law.

l Make preventive care free and eliminate co-pays for essential health care such as checkups and cancer screenings.

l Crack down on waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and deliver prescription drug savings to seniors. Progress Iowa, an advocacy group, reports that 388,676 Iowans with Medicare have received free preventive services - such as mammograms and colonoscopies - or a free annual wellness visit with their doctor. And 42,015 Iowans on Medicare have saved an average of $616 on prescription drugs.

Meanwhile, presidential candidate Mitt Romney has run away from the successful plan he implemented in Massachusetts and is now backing Rep. Paul Ryan's health care vision. The Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it, shifting more costs onto seniors and giving tax breaks to big corporations. It would mean that the patients we see that need care most would no longer have access to it.

Ryan's plan would cut Medicaid, devastating our patients who are seniors, forcing them out of their nursing homes and leaving children and people with disabilities with nowhere to turn.

It's a bit of a mystery to us why Romney would disavow a plan that the Massachusetts Hospital Association says has achieved excellent results. In the Bay State, 98 percent of residents have health care coverage. While Iowa is doing well relative to most states, nearly 11 percent of us have no medical insurance.

Recently, officials at the state's largest hospital, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, expressed concern that the hospital will have only a 3 percent profit margin next year. That's still higher than the national median non-profit hospital operating margin of 2.6 percent in fiscal year 2011, according to Moody's Investor Service. The administrators have laid the groundwork with the Board of Regents for potential staffing decisions that could have a negative impact on patient care.

The ACA could really help the bottom line at UIHC and other Iowa hospitals, helping them avoid making fiscal decisions that don't benefit patients. In fact, the Massachusetts Hospital Association reports that because of health care reform there, hospitals have taken billions of dollars out of the rising expense trend over the last three years.

Perhaps by 2014, when the ACA is supposed to be fully implemented, UIHC and other Iowa hospitals can look forward to trimming costs and boosting profits.

Ann Byrne, of West Branch, Renae Council, of Clinton, and Pauline Taylor, of Iowa City, are members of SEIU Local 199. Comments: info@seiuiowa.org