Cost Conundrum and Healthcare Essay

After years of schooling and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, doctors aren’t even able to work on their own terms. “Consumers allegedly have a “right” to what health care providers provide, a “right” to say what will be provided, when, and at what price” (Salsman 2012). Consumers shouldn’t have a “right” to what is provided to them or how much it costs. The government controls pricing and controls who can receive care and what kind. It’s not right that those who are actually working in the medical profession that they have lost control of their businesses.

Rising medical costs are a worldwide problem, but nowhere are they higher than in the U.S. Although Americans with good health insurance coverage may get the best medical treatment in the world, the health of the average American, as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality, is below the average of other major industrial countries. Inefficiency, fraud and the expense of malpractice suits are often blamed for high U.S. costs, but the major reason is overinvestment in technology and personnel.

Health care expenditures is an increasing proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries as its share in GDP increased by an average of nearly 2 percent annually in last 40 years. Health care expenditures in the US increased 6.2 on average annually between 1991 and 2011. Health care spending consisted 17.9 percent of GDP in the US in 2011.

The increase of expenses - As politicians continue their dissension amongst each other, the situation is worsening in our healthcare system. According to the World Health Organization, to achieve universal health coverage, countries need a financial system that enables people access to all types of health services without incurring financial hardship (Carrin, Mathauer, Xu, & Evans, 2011). This idea would be the foundation of innovative ideas that the U.S. could reform its healthcare system, but too many ideas are sabotaging any valid efforts. In the mean time, the U.S. healthcare system continues to deal with issues such as the increasing uninsured Americans (over 49 million), expensive administrative procedures and the inability to measure the accuracy of quality of care, access of care, and the increasing healthcare spending and financing that limit our ability to efficient utilize resources.

Through the history of health care, the standard of care changed from protecting our patient from injury and illness to a systemic entity to make money for insurance companies. Access to services and clinical outcomes are dependent on what health insurance providers will “pay” for in a clinical or community setting; as a result, patient safety, care and satisfaction has been negatively impacted.

Therefore the annual interest rate is 8% and the effective annual rate compounded quarterly is 8.24%

Shannon Brownlee writes of the flaws of the medical field in her book Overtreated. Medicine is one of the largest businesses in the United States, we spend now trillions of dollars on the health care system and most of it is wasteful spending. Wasteful spending includes: unnecessary tests like MRI’s, over prescribing drugs, and many ineffective surgeries. Many of these surgeries are unnecessary and can lead to problems in the future that can lead to even more surgeries that could have been avoided. Brownlee believes that this overtreatment is what is essentially wrong with the health care system today. This has led to excessive spending and a debate between affordable health care and well paid salaries for doctors, whose salaries weren’t as high as they are known to be today.

Looking back at our former healthcare system, we see that it was far from flawless, some say it is due to the government, while others claim the health insurance and the healthcare system in general is to blame. So it 's no wonder that the healthcare system is constantly fluctuating. These fluctuations have let us to a system that was very flawed and in dire need of rectification. Furthermore, the health insurance market wasn’t readily accessible to the middle and lower class, due to high costs, bizarre prerequisites, and complicated terminology.

The fields of medicine and business are two fields that are derived from different ends of the motive spectrum in terms of cognition (how we think) and economics (how we think about our money). At least they should be. I believe that the underlying issue with the United States healthcare system is that there tends to be a large amount of overlay in these two opposite forms of cognition. Clearly illustrated by Dr. Steven Nissen when he says that, “When medicine became a business, we lost our moral compass.” Medicine was never meant to become a trillion dollar business. This might strike you to be quite a jarring

3.2 trillion dollars are spent every year on the United States healthcare system (CMS). Estimates report that on average there are 2.6 million deaths in America on a yearly basis (CDC). The source of these calamities is simple: a poor healthcare system. Until American political parties arrive at a consensus, this country’s citizens will continue to fight the war on healthcare. Meanwhile politicians and hospitals fight each other tooth and nail, Atul Gawande, in his article “Overkill”, takes an insider approach into the current health care system to uncover the flaws that are that are forcing patients to collectively pay trillions of dollars each year for healthcare. However, while he does pose valid claims, he misinterprets the culprit and

Grossman’s model states that a person utility is based on health (H) and other non-health related goods (Z) that the person consumes. The production possibility frontier for Grossman model shows the tradeoff between home good production (Z) and health (H). Unlike usual production possibility frontiers, an individual needs an optimal level of H to maximize consumption of Z goods.

As mentioned before healthcare is unlike any other industry because when you are a consumer of the industry often times you are not completely rational because you’re faced with the tradeoff of cost versus health. As a consumer, you do not weigh your alternatives or assess the costs, you simply pick your health. Healthcare is driven by fear, as a consumer of the healthcare industry, your decision making is clouded by that fear. This fear is what allows the healthcare market to charge prices they know that no one can afford, the ominous

There is no doubt that healthcare cost are rising out of control. No one likes the

There is no denying the fact that the cost of health care in the United States has been on a constant rise than the wage of the employees that pay to have access to better healthcare. There is the general fear among these employees that if the rising cost of the health care is not brought under control, there will come a time, and some analyst think, the time is already here, when those employees will not be able to afford health care for themselves and their families. This fear of the unknown is particularly evident among those closer to retirement. Employers of labor have for quite sometimes now, been shifting the burden of the high cost of affordable health care to their employees, and that has significantly reduced employee standard of

Government financed health care typically has more control to place limitations on care offered to patients and doctors in order to keep costs down. Since payers must try to deliver the most care for the