The Effects Of Hepatitis C Virus On Health Care And Ensuring Healthy Profit Margins

"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 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the 2010 health reform act that could extend insurance coverage to as many as 32 million Americans, which also included policies that affect the quality of coverage insurers must offer (Knickman & Kovner, 2015). In addition to this, the ACA created a range of programs focused on furthering change in how medical care is organized and delivered, with a goal of reducing costs and improving quality and outcomes (Knickman & Kovner, 2015). However, these goals come at a cost. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact the ACA had on the population it affected in the United States as a nation, but specifically in the state of North Carolina; describe the impact of economics of providing care to patients from the organization’s point of view; examine how patients were affected by the ACA in terms of the cost, quality, and access to treatment; and explain the ethical implications of the ACA.

Insurance is a critical part in the health care of Americans that would use it for life threatening, unaffordable and spontaneous health issues. But instead insurance has created substantial problem because it is being utilized as a payment system for everyday primary health care and not to cure

The medical home model is viewed as resonating well with the new and highly effective regimens of Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) treatment and could reduce the prevalence of the disease. The authors used statistical data in demonstrating the challenges faced by patients with chronic HCV infection against the limitation of the existing healthcare system besides the ACA. The study considered the ACA as beneficial in this regard, owing to its integration of the behavioral and medical healthcare, and also on account that ACA expands the eligibility of Medicaid and offers consumer premium subsidies. The study recommended that by maximizing ACA, the public would benefit more in dealing with such serious infections as opposed to relying on the ordinary healthcare

Over 1 million Americans live with HIV. While treatable, medical costs are often increasing. The CDC reports that the estimated lifetime cost of treating HIV is $379,000 (in 2010 dollars), and that nearly 30 percent of those living with the virus are uninsured. Justin Terry-Smith was diagnosed with HIV in 2006. He lives in Washington D.C., a city whose HIV infection rate exceeds the World Health Organization’s definition of a “severe epidemic.”

As much as Medicaid being able to cover the costs of other expensive specialty drugs for other diseases such as HIV and cystic fibrosis but the case of Sovaldi is quite different given the fact that a large population suffers from the disease that it treats with the prevalence of hepatitis C among the Medicaid recipients being quite high. There have been several proposed federal solutions including; price controls, the creation of a supply chain where the federal government could buy quantities of the drug at a discount and also to sell the drug to the states at a low price. The issue has not yet been taken by the Congress with states still being given the

HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus, and if left untreated, can lead to AIDS (Fauci, 1988). Globally, 36.7 million people are living with HIV and 1.2 million are living with HIV in the United States. Over the last decade, the annual number of new HIV diagnoses decreased by 19%, and many health professionals and public health researchers attribute this to both awareness and prevention. Research shows that there is an economic benefit of preventing disease because it lowers healthcare costs (Hogg, Baskerville, & Lemelin, 2005). It has been found that for every HIV infection prevented, an estimated $355,000 is saved in the cost of providing lifetime HIV treatment (Benjamin, 2011). There is a national need for prevention of diseases such as AIDS to lower healthcare costs while improving the quality of people’s lives, and the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) responds to this need with its emphasis on disease prevention, improving access to coverage, ensuring quality coverage, and by enhancing the capacity of the healthcare delivery system (Koh & Sebelius, 2010).

In recent years, rising drug prices in the United States raises have impacted patient access to medications, including potentially life-saving medications. It has become extremely difficult for patient to receive medications. The blame is being shifted from insurers, drug manufactures, and the government. Insurers are protesting that specialty drug costs are forcing them to jack up premiums. State Medicaid directors say spiking pharmacy costs are coercing them to make unfortunate coverage trade-offs. From the consumer’s perspective, there is a constant cycle of blame and no actual progress. Fortunately, there are possible solutions the US healthcare can implement to help alleviate rising drug costs; for example, an expedited Abbreviated

Hepatitis C is a prevalent health care problem. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2016), approximately 2.7-3.9 million of the adult population in the United States is infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV). Some groups of people are at risk for Hepatitis C infection, including current injection drug users, people who received the blood transfusion before 1992, organ recipients from a donor who tested positive for hepatitis C virus, hemodialysis patients, and children born to a hepatitis C mother (CDC, 2016). Hepatitis C causes embarrassment and isolation from the society. Self-esteem and understanding of the family, friend and community will motivate the patient to have a good quality life in society. This

Since the arrival of triple therapy, the challenge of sustained and complete viral suppression has been solved for the majority of patients [1]. The major limiting factors for improving the long-term success of ART are tolerability and convenient pill burden [2]. The latest class of the antiretroviral drug developed are Integrase inhibitors (INI). Dolutegravir (DTG) is an Integrase inhibitor, particularly focused on maintaining a favorable safety profile and a high efficiency rate, within a single-tablet regime (STR), it improves resistance barrier and allowing co-formulation with an NRTI backbone. Dolutegravir has been compared against both other classes of HIV anti-retrovirals as well as other integrase nuclear strand inhibitors. In August 2013, DTG was approved by FDA for its use in both patients who have never taken ART (ART-naïve) and patients who have taken ART (ART-experienced) [3]. It is predicted that very soon a STR containing Dolutegravir (DTG), abacavir (ABC) and lamivudine (3TC) will become

There are a number of individuals who may be suffering from an illness and not even be aware they have an illness. One example of such illness is Hepatitis C (HCV). Hepatitis C is a severe disease of the liver. It is caused by the Hepatitis C virus (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2015). As a result, Hepatitis C has been termed a silent epidemic (CDC, 2015). This is because a lot of individuals have Hepatitis C and don’t even realize they have the infection (CDC, 2015). As the infection begins to progress over time, it could cause acute issues to the liver (CDC, 2015). Those issues could be things like damage to the liver, the liver could fail to function, cirrhosis, or even cancer of the liver (CDC, 2015). However, screening for Hepatitis C will allow an individual to benefit from treatments that are available, hence eliminating the disease from the body and preventing the liver from undergoing any further damage (CDC, 2015).

Hepatitis C is definitely not a public health crisis that needs emergency intervention in terms of the policy makers being pressured to make a decision urgently. However, thousands of citizens of the United States die on a yearly basis from this contagious disease (CDC, 2014). This makes it a serious public health issue. Hepatitis C is basically a liver disease that is contagious in nature and could be fatal if left untreated. According to the CDC website over 3 million Americans are infected with the disease (HCV), and “approximately 75%–85% of people who become infected with Hepatitis C virus develop chronic infection”. Hepatitis C is most commonly transmitted in the United States through IV drug use (CDC, 2014). Other modes of transmission includes blood transfusion or coming in contact with someone’s blood, accidental needlestick injuries among health care workers (e.g., nurses and phlebotomists), sexual contact (rare) and infants born to mothers who have the disease. These above medical and demographic facts make HCV a serious threat on public health.

Affordable Care Act (ACA) attract high- profile attention, consuming over 17% of the nation’s gross domestic product, exceeding $2.7 trillion in costs; it is understandable that the health care occupies a central position in American popular and political disclosure (Sultz & Young, 2014). There are many different costs within the healthcare system from stakeholders involved, social choices, technology, networks, access and even problems or dilemmas that may come about. The dominant influence of the government, the evolution of high technology medicine and the access to healthcare as made a huge impact on the U.S. Healthcare system.

In 2014, there was an estimate of 36.9 million people and climbing living with HIV, and with a fatality rate of 100%, AIDS is disputably the deadliest infectious disease to strike mankind (UNAIDS). This number continually increases, not necessarily because more are becoming infected; however, because more people are receiving antiretroviral therapy globally and living longer. Nonetheless, even though HIV infections are declining, there is still an astronomical number of new infections and deaths occurring yearly. The development of HIV antivirals and vaccines has been

HIV is a retrovirus that will constantly attack human’s immune system once an individual is infected and will eventually develop to AIDS, often a deadly sexually transmitted disease. Currently, there are different kinds of antiretroviral treatments available for patients who are tested to be HIV positive as well as patients with AIDS. HIV can easily develop resistance to its treatment through mutation each generation, which leads to ineffectiveness in treatment. The only way to continue to fight off HIV is to change treatment that is still available. Patients have to cooperate with experienced doctors by adhering to their professional recommendations, while doctors are responsible