Essay Sample on Healthcare Economics: Unveiling the Issues of Rising Costs

Introduction

The healthcare-economics system allows for thorough scrutiny of the issues or problems usually encountered in promoting health. A range of cost-effective information like the costs, charges, and expenditures are taken into consideration. Health today is a drastically booming sector that had been dormant for quite some time in the past. Today, the health care costs are increasing significantly in terms of the spending on drugs prescribed, new technology, overuse and misuse of healthcare, the rise of chronic disease conditions, and defensive medicine, among others. There is a rise in healthcare spending and its reinventions and innovations, which are attributed to new technology and prescribed drugs. Reports on healthcare spending show an upward trajectory year in year out for a reason being; hospitals keep raising their prices while Americans are spending more on care services.

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Impact of New Technology and Uneven Insurance Coverage on the Healthcare SystemHospitals are advancing today; new machines and equipment have been established and are in use. For this reason, the cost of offering healthcare services has to increase. The hospitals have invested so much that they are boosting the healthcare economy. With technology, a plethora of renovations are in place and demanding for more labour. It expenses are attributed to the increased job market in healthcare. With the Affordable Care Act that expanded coverage, then came an increase in hiring, increase in the number of those seeking medical attention (Niles, 2019). Research has shown that the current healthcare economic boom is related to the accessibility to the more costly, medical types of machinery, which are fueling healthcare spending for developmental costs, generating a more intense and costly service even when not necessary.

On the other hand, there is the issue of health insurance, whereby not everyone is covered as expected. The absence of universal health insurance coverage is significantly wedging the healthcare system of the country. In 2009, it was projected that absence of a universal health cover in the U.S. would cost the public roughly one hundred and twenty-four billion to two hundred and forty-eight billion dollars annually (Crowley et al., 2020). The minimum estimate indicated the decreased lifetime of Americans without coverage, while the higher rating represented the expenses associated with reduced lifespan and the forfeiture of yield among the sick uninsured. Unlike other nations like German, health insurance coverage is bumpy with the minorities and the poor being the most affected and underserved. Among the forty million workers, almost 2 in 5, lack access to compensated sick leave (Niles, 2019). As a result, going to work while sick can exacerbate the medical problem/condition if sick, reduce one's productivity, and drive up health care costs than it should have been.

Medical coverage by the employer usually varies by one's wage level. It is an indicator that the low-wage workers may or may not receive medical coverage. The act that was implemented has allowed for the decrease in the number of those uninsured significantly. Lack of universal healthcare coverage in the U.S. makes it easy for one to go into bankruptcy, unlike in other countries like Norway, Japan, the U.K., and German, who have almost negligible numbers of bankruptcy (Tseng et al., 2018). With the implementation of ACA, it is expected that the number of bankruptcy cases will decline like it did in Massachusetts. The ACA act was designed to help improve competition among healthcare providers, ultimately delivering choice transparency to their customers. Those who could not afford the insurance cover as they are below the federal poverty line were now eligible.

How Healthcare Can Be Improved

The U.S. healthcare sector is looking to implement the international perspective of nearly fully covered. In German, 90% of medical costs are covered by insurance and 10% by an individual, which is okay (Tseng et al., 2018). Having a stable, effective, and equitable health care system becomes more comfortable to control health care costs while protecting the vulnerable individual who could be falling through the crack. To improve healthcare, the United States should seek a national health package where salaried state physicians deliver healthcare services in public infirmaries. Secondly, it has adopted a multi-payer health indemnification system that provides its people with coverage through sickness funds that are, in turn, used to cater to their services eliminating the administrative billing costs like it is done in France and Japan (Tseng et al., 2018). Lastly, a national health insurance system allows the government to accumulate healthcare payments and disburse all health care expenses. Like Canada and Taiwan, medical services are not publicly delivered but are funded publicly.

References

Crowley, R., Daniel, H., Cooney, T. G., & Engel, L. S. (2020). Envisioning a better US health care system for all: coverage and cost of care. Annals of Internal Medicine, 172(2_Supplement), S7-S32.

https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2759529

Niles, N. J. (2019). Basics of the US health care system. Jones & Bartlett Learning. https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Nf-pDwAAQBAJ

Tseng, P., Kaplan, R. S., Richman, B. D., Shah, M. A., & Schulman, K. A. (2018). Administrative costs associated with physician billing and insurance-related activities at an academic health care system. Jama, 319(7), 691-697. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2673148

The U.S. Health Care System: An International Perspective

https://dpeaflcio.org/programs-publications/issue-fact-sheets/the-u-s-health-care-system-an-international-perspective/