The country?s booming business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, as well as Filipino health care professionals, are expected to benefit from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which the US Supreme Court has just upheld, Pasig City Rep. Roman Romulo said over the weekend.
ACA or Obamacare basically means that millions of lower middle-class Americans who currently do not have any health insurance protection will enjoy subsidized coverage, according to Romulo.
?A greater number of Americans will now have access to health care, especially hospitalization, thus creating new demand for such services,? Romulo said.
?Simply put, the US hospital industry is bound to boom, and so will their demand for foreign staff,? he said.
In the past, US hospitals struggled financially as they were forced to write off the unpaid bills of uninsured patients.
For years, the Philippines has been America?s chief supplier of foreign health care workers, mostly nurses.
Romulo also said he expects Obamacare to drive US health insurance companies to aggressively expand their back offices in the Philippines.
?US health insurers will be under pressure to slash operating costs in order to stay profitable. They will have no choice but to relegate more jobs to the Philippines, where labor and other costs are lower,? he said.
?They will be compelled to transfer more contact center, insurance claims processing, clinical support analysis, medical coding, and other non-core, business support jobs to the Philippines,? he added.
The Philippines? highly labor-intensive, BPO and IT-enabled services industry includes contact center services; back offices; medical, legal and other data transcription and coding; animation; software development; engineering design; and digital content.
The IT and Business Processing Association of the Philippines sees the industry yielding up to $26 billion in annual revenues and directly employing some 1.3 million Filipinos by 2016.
