Health Care Myths

Cherry, B., & Jacob, S.(1997). Chapter 7 Paying for Health Care in America: Rising Costs and

In 1954, Congress passed legislation allowing employers to provide health insurance benefits to employees on a tax-free basis (Sih and Singh 99). This legal provision marked the beginning of the rapidly expanding health care costs still apparent today due to the major incentives provided by the government to obtain employer-based health coverage. The overwhelming popularity of employer-based health insurance has led to a serious market inefficiency resulting from the system of third-party payment. As individuals rely on their insurance companies to pay for their medical expenses, this provides

With rising healthcare costs being distributed predominantly on workers or their companies, the economic responsibility is placed on the very people who need it the least: the job creators. If the economic responsibility of healthcare costs was shifted to the government, the private sector job creators could have more revenue to stimulate the economy with additional jobs, better wages, and improved worker benefits. The best way to shift this cost obligation is via a single-payer healthcare system. A single-payer would make sure all citizens would be covered for all medical services, including doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug, and medical supply costs.

The foremost concept of the Affordable Care Act was to allow for more poverty-stricken Americans to be able to gain access to health care. Yet, if you widen the amount of people can get free health care, who is meant to pay for them? In order for this new program to work, the US government needed enough young and healthy Americans to pay into the costs of having health care. However, problems began when Americans were finding that it was less expensive to just take the penalty for not having health care. Elementary office secretary, Catherine Moore explained in a personal interview, how a co-worker had also come across this same realization. “I worked with a lady that during the first year [of the Affordable Care Act] it was cheaper for her to take the penalty than to pay for insurance.” So now, not only is the government missing out on money that could have been used to support those who could not afford health care, but it is also encouraging healthy people who may not

The rising cost of health care has led companies to stop offering health insurance for employees, and private insurance is often too expensive for people to afford. Many families make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, but are unable to pay for private health insurance. Health care costs in the United States have more than doubled in the last twenty years. Insurance premiums are rising five times faster than wages, and Americans are spending more money on health care than people in any other country. The average amount one person pays per year for health care in the United States is 134 times higher than the average of other industrialized countries (“Health Care Issues”). Even people who have insurance aren’t guaranteed coverage. Many insurance companies find loopholes to avoid paying for expensive medical treatment, leaving people with massive debt from medical bills. Medical bills and illness cause over half of all personal bankruptcies in the United

Public policy, such as subsidies in the form of tax credits for the purchase of health plans through the exchanges, have been in existence since the inception of the ACA, but one could contend that this falls short on many fronts. Subsidy thresholds and amounts are simply too low and premium costs too high for many middle-income earners to make ends meet. In some cases people would rather risk going without insurance and pay the penalty, than pay for a plan they can’t afford to use anyway (Bernard,

An issue that is widely discussed and debated concerning the United States’ economy is our health care system. The health care system in the United States is not public, meaning that the states does not offer free or affordable health care service. In Canada, France and Great Britain, for example, the government funds health care through taxes. The United States, on the other hand, opted for another direction and passed the burden of health care spending on individual consumers as well as employers and insurers. In July 2006, the issue was transparency: should the American people know the price of the health care service they use and the results doctors and hospitals achieve? The Wall Street Journal article revealed that “U.S. hospitals,

The U.S. is an industrialized nation that continues to be behind on providing health care coverage to all citizens. However, the German health care system came up with a plan that ensured all citizens are provided with some form of health care coverage; nevertheless, the U.S. continues to dispute health care reform and how to provide coverage to all citizens. “Health spending per capita in the United States is much higher than in other countries – at least $2,535 dollars, or 51%, higher than Norway, the next largest per capita spender. Furthermore, the United States spends nearly double the average $3,923 for the 15 countries ("Health Care Cost," 2011, table 1)”.

U.S. health care reform is currently one of the most heavily discussed topics in health discourse and politics. After former President Clinton’s failed attempt at health care reform in the mid-1990s, the Bush administration showed no serious efforts at achieving universal health coverage for the millions of uninsured Americans. With Barack Obama as the current U.S. President, health care reform is once again a top priority. President Obama has made a promise to “provide affordable, comprehensive, and portable health coverage for all Americans…” by the end of his first term (Barackobama.com). The heated debate between the two major political parties over health care reform revolves around how to pay for it and more importantly, whether it

The health care system in the United States is one of the greatest concerns facing Americans today and is an issue both moral and economic in nature. Some think the system should stay, for all intents and purposes, the same. They believe that the right to healthcare is a stepping stone toward socialism, and that it is the responsibility of the individual to obtain health care. These are usually the more ideologically conservative citizens and politicians who believe that medicine should remain a free enterprise, not to be constrained by government interference. Then there are those who believe that healthcare is a right, and the federal government has a responsibility to make sure it is available to all citizens, not just those who can afford

The United States does not provide healthcare to its citizens the way rest of the countries do. Instead of guaranteeing that all are covered, it works on a market-based system where those who are insured, receive their coverage as a condition of employment, whereas others must purchase individual policies or obtain coverage through Medicaid or private insurance companies, and not everyone would qualify to receive health care benefits. For decades, health care has been an issue for the country, especially for the people who are ill and cannot afford coverage. However, when Obama became president, he created a law that allows more opportunities for the population to receive health insurance without further complications or strict requirements that many private companies have. The law has remained a focus of heated political debate from the day it was suggested. The dispute surrounding the law creates pressure regarding whether the reform has been beneficial or a complete failure. Indeed, the one unifying aspect of all of the debate over the reform was the fact that everyone acknowledged that reform was needed, but as to what that alteration should be was the contentious part of the debate. Through extensive research, and despite common objections, it is clear that health care reform shows positive impacts based on the effects in certain states, the expansion of Medicaid, and its effectiveness today.

46 million or 15.4 percent of citizens in America are without any sort of medical insurance (speak out-now). Additionally, in 2007 22 million people were burdened with high medical expenses relative to their annual income (Daschle 2009, 173). With such a large amount of Americans without coverage and a secondary group of people who have health insurance, but are being crippled by the costs of the insurance they already have. Due to this financial stress being put on the voters of America, healthcare reform became the hot button issue of the 2008 presidential election and the paramount achievement of President Obama’s term in office.

In a study performed in 2015, four analyzers declared that “Over the past three decades the percent of American workers enrolled in conventional health insurance plans has declined from 73 percent to less than 1 percent” (Boddy, Dokko, Nantz, & Schanzenbach, 2015). Moreover, two professors examined data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to reveal a startling discovery: “Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that school district costs for teachers' health insurance rose at an average annual rate of 4 percent above inflation from 2004 to 2012. In 2004, health insurance costs tacked 11.4 percent onto teacher earnings; in 2012, they added 15.5 percent.” (Costrell & Dean, 2013). These statistics emphasize how policies

Measuring the changes of health care spending is at the heart of health economics that aims to help policymakers and large employers alike in their search to optimally design and regulate the health insurance market. An optimal market such that it constrains the staggering growth of health care expenditures without significantly reducing the quality of health care consumed. Within the US, the authors find that the GDP has grown from about 5% to a confounding 17.4% in the past half century. Brot-Goldberg et al. seems to implicitly warn that such demand-side policy changes like the HDHP are likely to be counterproductive. The authors emphasize to their readers that the government needs to recognize the limit of cost-sharing coverage plans and focus more on the supply-side policies such as looking at how to properly

Regardless of one’s financial standing, health care is an essential service. Without proper care, a cold can turn into pneumonia, a broken leg can turn into a disability, and high blood pressure can lead to a fatal heart attack. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize why nearly every industrialized nation has transitioned to a health care system that is both universal, and tightly controlled by the government. What’s less obvious, however, is how and why the United States has fallen so terribly behind these other nations. Despite the efforts of the Affordable Care Act, the largest American health reform bill since the 1960s, 11% (roughly 35 million) of the American population was uninsured in 2016 (McArdle, 2016).