Furthermore, the amount of patients a doctor sees in a day affects the money rate. If a doctor sees a great amount of patients on a daily basis, the money rate and income will be ample. Money rate and income is also influenced by the severity of both the illness diagnosed and the prescription prescribed to treat that specific illness. By diagnosing patients with severe illnesses and prescribing them with strongly effective medications, the money rate also increases. ProPublica, an investigative journalism group based in New York City, conducted an analysis on 150,000 doctors to demonstrate the relationship between the payments doctors receive from pharmaceutical companies and how the drugs are prescribed to each patient (Ornstein et al.1).
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.
"In the past two decades or so, health care has been commercialized as never before, and professionalism in medicine seems to be giving way to entrepreneurialism," commented Arnold S. Relman, professor of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School (Wekesser 66). This statement may have a great deal of bearing on reality. The tangled knot of insurers, physicians, drug companies, and hospitals that we call our health system are not as unselfish and focused on the patients' needs as people would like to think. Pharmaceutical companies are particularly ruthless, many of them spending millions of dollars per year to convince doctors to prescribe their drugs and to convince consumers that their specific brand of drug is needed in
The documentary “Money and Medicine,” reveals the essentials of unnecessary health care spending and the policies that intervene with the health care systems. In the beginning of the film, the people being interviewed talked about patients receiving major amounts of unnecessary treatment and that a majority of health care spending is devoted to needless services. Several physicians in the video explained the extreme dangers that are present within health care; along with clarifying that they are paid more when doing harm to their patients and when they do more for them even if it is not beneficial to do so. If the cost of health care continues to rise, health care will become too expensive and unavailable that the U.S. will be put in a financial
It is commonly believed that the method of physician remunerations affects their professional behavior. As a result, payment systems are therefore manipulated in attempts to achieve policy objectives with the primary aim to improve quality of care, contain cost and maintain recruitment of human resources in underserved areas. (2,1)
I really enjoyed this article, as it went into effective financial planning. The 2 major categories of cost are total charges (the patient's bill) and the cost of providing services. These 2 costs can be defined mathematically in the following indices: average revenue per patient day and the cost per patient day.
Essential healthcare management includes the financial growth and feasibility of the health care organization. In order for a healthcare organization to reach its full potential it needs to be fully staffed with both medical and managerial professionals, as well as having the funds to invest in the most up to date technology. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation “Baseline estimates show that over 41 million individuals were uninsured in 2013, 61% of uninsured adults said the main reason they were uninsured was because the cost was too high or because they had lost their job”. The EMTALA or Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act or anti-dumping law was enacted in 1986 it was designed to prevent hospitals from transferring the uninsured or Medicaid patients to public hospitals without providing a medical screening examination to ensure they were stable for transfer first. Regardless of their options to pay, they are to be seen and treated with life-saving and "stabilizing" emergency care with transfers to advanced trauma centers, if need be. Effective Human Resources coupled with a balance between cost and revenue are essential to being able to provide quality Health Care. It has been proven these elements all play positive roles in contributing to the overall efficiency of the system. An organization can enhance the quality of health care provided just by focusing on the major components.
In the United States, health care has become a huge expense and has threatened the economy; additional measures need to be taken to address the rising cost of care. An individual spends an estimated eight thousand dollars a year in health care expenditures. Therefore, we need to recognize that how a physician reimbursement for payment has a vast impact on the economy and the rising cost of health care.
A rapidly growing component of US healthcare expenditure has been the growth of pharmaceutical marketing. Visits by pharmaceutical representatives (known as detailing) to physicians have a $15 billion dollars annual marketing cost. Marketing expense has arisen intensified public analysis, with evaluators challenging that costlier, and possibly less cost effective drugs, must do with the effect of physician-directed promotion have a role in the rise of HealthCare cost and excessively prescribing habits of physicians’. Signifying that a record amount of correlation among physician and direct promotion drug sale are signaled – minded bias.
1A. Market failure is a situation in which the allocation of goods and services is not efficient. In any given market, the quantity of a product demanded by consumers does not equate to the quantity supplied by suppliers. This is a direct result of a lack of certain economically ideal factors, which prevents equilibrium.
Perceptual differences among consumers and economist are due in part to media influence such as reports on the abuse of the health care systems, investigations concerning fraud, and opposing political banter. The fact is, albeit slow, the cost of health care is rising, however the rise has been unprecedentedly slow.
You have been asked by a health care magazine to write a series of articles focusing on health care financial concepts. The articles will be included in five consecutive issues and will be geared towards readers with little knowledge of finance. You must ensure that the articles are both informative and engaging to your audience. You must also ensure that your articles relate financial principles to the health care industry.
Throughout the past few years the healthcare industry has taken some precautions due to the recent bill passed that affect it, that being the healthcare reform or the Affordable Care Act (Kavilanz, 2010). In the past years healthcare has not been a concern of the average American, but this is changing rapidly. Though in 2014 healthcare was not among the top three concerns it did fall at number four (Cook, 2015). While at number four on the list last year it’s surely to increase in concern as the healthcare act becomes in full swing in 2015 (Cook, 2015). As Lindsay cook points out in her U.S News article on health care 2015 will be the year doctors see a pay cut and Americans without insurance see a penalty (Cook, 2015). Just like the rule of supply and demand, when the money supply of hardworking Americans decrease, the demand or concern in this case will increase.
Consequently, it become a financial problem where physician sees no improvement in their revenue/profit, and the cost of treatments continue to rise as reimbursement challenges the physician’s charges. There is always a cost to a better health care and coverage, and vast of it comes from taxation. Hospital and physicians function on funding to keep the door open and operating, and majority of the funding are from taxation. For
Recently, there has been a debate about the high prescription drug prices in the United States. Accounting for 9.7% of the national health expenditure, $329.2 billion was spent on prescription medications ($931 per person) in 2011 (Linton, 2014). So what exactly is the average American getting with their $931? Well, because there is an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and energy that goes into creating, manufacturing, and distributing a new drug, it’s no wonder the prices are so high. But what other costs are folded into the prices of your prescribed medications? This review looks beyond just the research and development costs needed to take a new drug from idea to shelf by examining several journals and other credible, secondary sources, to shed some light on how much pharmaceutical companies are spending to develop, advertise, and sell their drugs.
Without the cash flow coming in to medical facilities, the government would see this as a failure. With the cash market resting at $260 billion in the United States alone it is no wonder why this balance has to co-exist (Newswire Association, 2014). A shortage of doctors has already been anticipated by this new initiative, and means to pay cash has been a popular option among many individuals. With a fast paced society it is no wonder why citizens choose not to wait in long lines at the behest of insurance companies, or public health exchanges.