Provide a discussion that demonstrates you have an understanding of the impact the cost of health care has on the economy. Be sure to discuss the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Health Care spending is on a raised emotional and physical. Health care spending is concerning the United States economy is healthcare system. The majority countries the healthcare system in the United States is not public, meaning that the state does not provide free or despicable healthcare services. Gross domestic product is perceived to be one of the primary indicators used to determine the health of any country’s economy.
It usually embodies the total dollar value of all goods and services that are produced over a particular period of time. Basically it is expressed as a comparison to the preceding quarter or year. It is calculated either by adding up what all the citizens in a country have earned in that particular year (income approach ) or by adding up what was spent by everyone (expenditure method). The health conditions of societies are only reflected in the increase in costs of health system through GDP. A more expensive health care system will increase the value of GDP.
High income also does not reflect the health condition of an individual. A more advanced technique in health care system which causes life-expectancy, inefficiency, lifestyles and prevention is not reflected in GDP. The cost and benefits from health is hard to identify in GDP. GDP only measures the size of the pie but not how the pie is divided up. When a country’s GDP increases, this means that the country has more goods and products, however those goods may be unequally distributed as GDP do not provide the compositions of products consumed by a typical person.
Healthcare is a very important component of national development and that the creation of a healthy and productive workforce is essential to support and sustain the growth of the nation. Health care legislation impacts an array of factors such as quality of health care, insurance coverage, the free market, etc. Select two to three (2-3) areas impacted by health care legislation such as HR 3962, and provide an argument in support of the health care act and two arguments that are in opposition to such a health care act.
The new healthcare bill in the United States, called the Affordable Care Act, has changed American healthcare for the worse. There are three main groups besides politicians and the public who are most affected by this bill. There are associations like the American Medical Association who are concerned with the wide ranging global and national effects of the bill. There are individual professionals who are concerned what the bill will mean for their profession and there are the insurance companies who are having difficulties incorporating the bill.
Some of the problems with the bill include, but are not limited to, hospital/doctor reimbursement for patients who do not pay, lack of incentive for doctors to specialize, and the insurance companies’ issues with implementing the new stipulations. While the Affordable Care Act is supposed to alleviate for the poor by providing them with healthcare plans they would otherwise not have access to, the Act leaves too many problems unsolved to be considered a good thing for the United States. The dream is health coverage for everyone in the United States. It will not matter if you are rich or poor, sick or well.
Congress recently passed a bill that reaches for this goal. The bill is called the Affordable Care Act. The new healthcare bill, hereafter called the ACA, has changed healthcare in the United States forever, but not for the better. There are three points of view on the new Act: global-professional, individual-professional, and the view on insurance. Each of these views has both good and bad things to say about the new Act, but the negatives outweigh the positive. According to the global professional point of view the Affordable Care Act is going to create more problems than it solves.
The beginning of these problems is that people are so focused on the provision of healthcare insurance for everyone, they forget about the healthcare workforce. In the article by Brenda Cleary from the American Medical Association, she highlights this issue, “There has been a great deal of attention on the expansion of health insurance to 32 million Americans and on the mandate to require individual Americans to have some form of health insurance by 2014 and less on other provisions, including those on the healthcare workforce” (Cleary).
This lack of provision for the healthcare workforce has the potential to create more problems than the ACA solves. Compare the three (3) main types of health insurance in the U. S. and assess the solvency of each. Make a prediction regarding the longevity of each type over the next 30 years. Health insurance is essential because it provides people with an affordable way to stay healthy and get medical care when ill. It also protects people and their families from the high cost of health care. In some cases, medical bills can be financially devastating.
The likelihood of no insurance is a real risk to many workers who may experience either phases of unemployment or jobs that do not provide health insurance benefits at all. The three most common forms of health insurance plans are fee-for-service, managed care, and consumer directed. Fee-for-service plans mean the doctor or other health care professional will be paid a fee for each health care service provided to the patient. Patients can see the doctor of their choice and either the health care professional or the patient files the claim (“Health insurance 101,” 2012).
There are two kinds of fee-for-service coverage: basic and major medical. Basic protection pays toward the costs of a hospital room and care while you are in the hospital. It covers some hospital services and supplies, such as x-rays and prescribed medicine. Basic coverage also pays toward the cost of surgery, whether it is performed in or out of the hospital, and for some doctor visits. Most fee-for-service plans have a “cap” or limit on the amount you pay for medical bills in any one year.
The insurance company pays the full amount in excess of the cap for the items covered under your policy – not including your monthly premium payments (“Fee for service,” 2012). Many experts point to the outdated fee-for-service (FFS) model of paying for care as a culprit in out of control health care cost growth. To help ensure a healthier and fiscally sustainable future for our nation, we must move away from FFS and realign incentives to promote value instead of volume of care (Barnes, 2012).
Managed care plans provide coverage for comprehensive health services to their members and offer financial incentives in the form of lower out-of-pocket costs to patients who use doctors participating in a network. More than half of all Americans have some kind of managed care plan – the three types include health maintenance organizations (HMOs), preferred provider organizations (PPO) and point-of-service (POS) plans (“Health insurance 101,” 2012). It also referred to as “consumer-driven,” or consumer choice,” consumer-directed health insurance plans give members more choice and flexibility in making health benefits decisions and more control over their health benefits dollars. These plans often include a health fund or account for covered medical expenses. Depending on the type of fund or account, unused dollars may be rolled over annually to cover medical expenses in subsequent years for the duration of the members’ enrollment in the plan.
There are several types of consumer-directed plans, including Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) (“Health insurance 101,” 2012). Debate whether or not private health insurance violates the standard principles of insurance. Insurance is a method for controlling the financial exposure to peril via two elementary principles: (1) shifting risk from an individual to a group, and (2) sharing losses on some reasonable basis by all affiliates of the group.
Contingent on the purchaser’s tolerance for risk and on one’s ability to resist the economic consequences of an actual loss, the amount and type of insurance necessitated can differ broadly. Risk is considered the chance of a loss and thus it is the risk, which people choose to insure against. And many health care professionals have noticed that these distinctive attributes of health insurance, when added to the economic arrangements of the medical care marketplace, have made health insurance a chief contributor to the ongoing development of health expenditures in the United States.
Employee health benefits and managed care are inseparably connected for a large preponderance of working American families. The United States is clearly the world leader in financing health services using the private health insurance (PHI) vehicle. In 2004, PHI financed 35 percent of the nation’s health care dollar, covering, to some extent, almost 85 percent of the population. PHI is by far the most comprehensive source of medical care financing for working Americans and it plays a pivotal role in influencing the direction and structure of the United States medical care system.
Since its inception in the United States, health insurance was purchased to shield an individual from a devastating loss necessitating hospital care. The presence of health insurance, in itself, creates a situation that stimulates demand and increases medical care prices, thereby raising the cost of health care and encouraging even greater insistence on more comprehensive coverage. As Personal Health
Insurance (PHI) progressed to include more people and a broader range of medical expenses, it started to hold certain encroachments of the principles of insurance. Specifically, a loss must be considered something out of the ordinary as well as something to be circumvented. Losses were also supposed to be based on independent events. However, infectious illness or even an epidemic, by nature, suggests a high degree of dependency amid protected losses. Furthermore, a loss must be of such financial distress that it is impractical to budget for it.
To illustrate, vision care insurance is on the brink of this insurance principle because of the standard principles of insurance, health insurance has developed into an essentially different product than most other forms of insurance. Analyze the evolution of the promotion of health and disease prevention in the U. S. and identify the point at which a clear shift in the thinking in the dominant culture occurred residing in the greatest impact on the health care insurance system in the United States. Prevention was a noticeable feature of the health care reforms that took place in the late 1960s through the early 1970s.
During that time, plans such as universal vaccination, promotion of lifestyle changes, population screenings, and safety guidelines were presented and became broadly acknowledged as means to advance public health while decreasing health care expenses. Eagerness for prevention strategies decreased in the mid- 1980s when some unforeseen outcomes became evident. Serious, often enduring, injuries were ascribed to some vaccines used for immunizations private health insurers had begun to use lifestyle factors as the basis for fostering rates and/or refuting consumer eligibility for disability benefits.
Furthermore, preventive screenings had come under scrutiny as possible tools for activities varying from denying employment to selective abortion and litigation increased with suits asserting that work-related safety standards were being used to exclude people from certain jobs (Clark, 2010). Increasing the focus on prevention in our communities will help improve America’s health, quality of life and success.
To illustrate, seven out of 10 deaths among Americans each year are from chronic diseases (such as cancer and heart disease), and nearly one out of every two adults has at least one chronic illness, many of which are preventable. Racial and ethnic minority communities experience greater rates of obesity, cancer, diabetes and AIDS. Children are also becoming progressively vulnerable, and today, almost one in every three children in our nation is overweight or obese which predisposes them to chronic disease and the numbers are even greater in African American and Hispanic communities (Clark, 2010).
The managed care organizations that thrived in the 1980s and 1990s presented the concept of insurance coverage for services stressing disease prevention and health education. For the first time, primary care providers were confident, and often ‘‘rewarded,’’ for attending to suitable screening and preventive care. Disease state managing programs, first emerging in the early 1990s, presented assertive interventions aimed at preventing disease onset, progression, and complications as well as delivering treatment for patients with chronic conditions.
Initiated in 1979 during the Carter administration, the Federal government started the Healthy People program to call attention to public health issues and establish 10-year targets for improvement in population health. Over the years, the program has collaborated with public health and other organizations across the country to offer education in the form of prevention programs, information, and resources (Clark, 2010).