As a nation we’ve been enamored with Healthcare for almost a century, give or take. We first started to grasp the need for affordable healthcare during the 26th presidency of our great country with President Theodore Roosevelt in Office. We dabbled with the idea, we debated over the various effective ways in which affordable healthcare could be made accessible for everyone, but we learned that reform in healthcare is a slow moving and can often be, an exasperating process. Despite the numerous obstacles in making affordable healthcare commonplace, some reforms have affected the trajectory of the evolution of healthcare in the US, more than others.

In the early twentieth century, 1939 to be specific, Group Health Insurance was introduced as an employee benefit and only a year later, new taxation reform exempted the employer/employee premium from federal taxes. This paved the way for the Group Health Insurance market to emerge as an Industry, and miraculously enough the tax exempt status of health insurance premiums is presently still in effect.

Less than thirty years later, Uncle Sam introduced Medicare and Medicaid, making the government one of the biggest proponents of the health insurance business. Then, in 1974, the HMO Act was passed as a way to curb the exploding health care strain, hence introducing the governance of managed care.

And finally, at the turn of the century, with only a decade into the new millennium, we dabbled with the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). We are still somewhat ambiguous about the financial repercussions of this act, but one thing’s for sure – the seemingly solipsistic nature of this legislation proved to be like a Taser is to an unsuspecting assailant, which in this case would be us, the people. As the Taser aims to definitively do away with the possibility of an impending onslaught, this Act was an attempt to do away with the fledgling healthcare we have in place today.

In this evolutionary journey through our moral and political conscience, there have been many other “blind-spot” policies and well-meaning reforms that have tried to challenge convention, but the four major changes discussed above have been quintessential in getting us into the healthcare quagmire that we are in today. I can’t say that technology hasn’t played its part to influence and segregate the way we extend healthcare services, but only to a small extent.

Yes, healthcare IT has redefined the way we manage patient records, the way we monitor patient surveillance data, the way we run our practices, but it has always been a policy, a legislation, or a reform that has been the catalyst in shaping the way we perceive our healthcare objectives.