Linda Schwimmer Explains NJ Health Care Quality Institute's Role

Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, more and more individuals are gaining access to insurance. Therefore, part of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute's responsibility is to make the complexities of the healthcare industry more easily understandable for members, according to Linda Schwimmer, JD, president and CEO of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute

Transcript (slightly modified)

What role does the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute provide for the state and its healthcare providers?

One of the important roles of the Quality Institute is that we are great translators. Healthcare’s really complicated and one of the things that the Affordable Care Act did that I’m so excited about is it really enabled so many more people to have health insurance, which is really sort of your entry way to getting healthcare, comprehensive healthcare, in the United States. Like it or not, that’s the system that we have and so through the Medicaid expansion, we have in New Jersey 400,000 more people who now have healthcare and through the subsidies, through the marketplace, hopefully they’ll be upheld by the courts in a couple of weeks. But through the subsidies, we also have about 200,000 more people in New Jersey that were able to purchase health insurance, who wouldn’t have been able to purchase it if they hadn’t had that sort of subsidy.

So for a lot of people, health insurance is new to them and health insurance is very complicated and the medical system’s very complicated so that and then all the other people who were in the healthcare system but still had a lot of questions, we’re able to sort of be that bridge to explain things that are complicated in bite-size pieces, in English, to sort of take some of the fear of it and to help people be better consumers of healthcare. I think that’s unique in that we have that deep knowledge but …we do our best to explain it as simply as possible.