Price Tags On Health Care

There is a move from a noncompetitive insurance environment to a competitive one because the competition was not by hospitals to provide the best and cheapest care, but rather among the insurers to get the healthiest patients. Consumer driven plans are central to the process because they are ideal for risk selecting the young and fit who have been driven to new plans. Healthy people could watch their account balances grow which leaves the truly sick behind in traditional plans. This particular type of competition is being used to attract the healthy and in turn lead to price increases because insurers have little incentive to control the prices medical providers are charged. It is the responsibility of the patients to worry about the cost and the patient does not have the same power as the insurance competitors do. According to a key South African regulator, Alex van den Heever of the Council for Medical Schemes, “Competition based on the shifting of risk

Having access to quality healthcare is major part of one’s life however the cost of care has been on the rise over the past decades and continue to rise every day due to many situation such

Health care expenses are a never ending headache that create numerous liabilities. Liabilities are created when goods or services are purchased on credit and obtained through short- term and long- term loans. Health care expenses create liabilities such that payments are made late or no payments are made at all. In some cases, the cost of health care expenses are unaffordable resulting in those type of payments. To prevent large health care debt, many individuals seek health insurance. Health insurance is provided by private insurance companies or by the government. It covers health care expenses and provides the necessary health care. Although, health insurance is necessary it can also be very costly.

What I currently view as an Economic issue would be the rising costs of Health Care, everyone needs Healthcare, but because of how expensive it is, most of the population cannot afford it. Even if people do have Health Care, they cannot afford paying the high premiums, out of pocket and high deductibles. Health care might not seem like an important topic, but is necessary for the daily lives of people, nobody knows what will happen in the next second of their lives. Everyone needs affordable health care and I think that reducing the cost of health care and making it possible for everyone to afford it would make everyone happy.

H. (04/2015). Comprehensive Health Insurance: Billing, Coding & Reimbursement, VitalSource for Allen School of Health Sciences, 1st Edition. [Bookshelf Online]. Retrieved from https://online.vitalsource.com/#/books/9781323131503/

Melnick, G., & Fonkycj, K. (2013). Fair pricing law prompts most California hospitals to adopt policies to protect uninsured patients from high charges. Health Affairs, 32(6), 1101-1108. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.nu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1372932073?accountid=2532

On the same level from a patient’s perspective, providers are even challenged with increased costs. Even though insurance is becoming more affordable the money, unfortunately has to be recovered utilizing other

Carol Liebau discusses in her article, “ObamaCare Limits Patient Choice”, that hospitals such as Cedars-Sinai and the Mayo Clinic are high-priced and under competitive pressure because of Obamacare. Insurance corporations are in a larger hurry than ever to cut costs (Liebau). However, Americans are coming to realize that those hospitals aren't just thoughtless profit centers. They are pricey because they provide advanced medical care or they offer the specialized treatments that the most ill patients require. Many Americans who had plans they could afford and had access to leading healthcare providers, find that under ObamaCare, they are being excluded from high-quality care unless they want to pay much more for

To conclude this report, there are four considerations of a legal and valid insurance contracts that patients may present at the provider’s office or clinic. The guide to understand and remember are as follows: (a) the patient or person insured must be a mentally competent adult and should not be under the influence of drugs or alcohol; (b) the insurance company must have a signed application and offer the policy to the patient, then the patient or person should accept the issuance of the policy without misrepresentation of facts on the application of the person being insured; (c) the services produced and sold or the exchange of value and the first premium payment should be submitted with the application considered must be presented together; and (d) there should be a legal purpose which is an insurable interest in the case of a person’s healthcare insurance policy. These are good guidelines to know and understand for the success of an administrative life cycle of a physician-based claim (CMS

Another factor that has contributed to the over-utilization and increased treatment charges is the fact that providers set the prices for services. Patients were free to seek any type of healthcare services that they thought they required for their well-being, while providers set the costs for each service that was billed to indemnity insurance companies (Shi & Singh, 2015). Insurance companies had little control on the types of services that the patient received and prices billed for each service. The fee-for-service model encourages excessive and unwarranted procedures and offers no incentives to utilize economical services

Perhaps the saddest part about these high prices are the people who will most feel the effects of the impossible costs. For the average healthy citizen, it is relatively easy to switch plans or providers in an effort to receive an optimal rate. Those who are already sick and injured, however, won’t have as easy a time of it. These people have

Where there is transparency, there is good accountability thereby reducing government deficit. “Its past time to require transparency of cost and outcomes, so consumers can make informed choices about their care. As patient – consumers increasingly transition to high-deductible plans and other models that increase their cost exposure, they will demand more transparency and information for the choices they need to make. However, simply having some awareness that not every hospital is performing equally well and consumers should be making informed choices is an important first step towards a true market-based healthcare system”(Rita Numerof

While there has been large media coverage about the insurance impacts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there has been a smaller amount discussed of the law’s changes to provider reimbursement policy, reforms to the delivery system, and investments in programs to improve the quality of care and constrain long-run growth in health care costs. And yet, the elements included in the ACA directed at cost and quality is possible to affect the practice of care for nearly every provider across the country. Although cost containment policies and initiatives are largely applied through federal health programs which including Medicare and Medicaid; cost containment in these programs has important cost-saving spillover effects to private health care markets through changes in health care practices and pricing across sectors of care.

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,

Besides, studies delving into the economics of the medical marketplace consistently find that a moderately higher or lower price doesn't change consumer purchasing decisions much, if at all, because in health care there is little of the price sensitivity found in conventional marketplaces, even on the rare occasion that patients know the cost in advance. Most hospital administrators defend such chargemaster rates at all, they maintain that they are just starting points for a negotiation. But patients don't typically know they are in a negotiation when they enter the hospital, nor do hospitals let them know that.