Health care is a huge added player in the hat rides the Current national expenditure levels in the United States has more than tripled in the past decade, while the amount of Americans that can afford private health insurance has dropped and the number of people relying on Medicaid and Medicare has increased with the aging baby boomer generation. Medicaid and Medicare being two of the governments most used medical insurances, the spending in health care has grown faster than the economy can bear.
The Medicare physician reimbursement system provides a kind of “public good” for other insurance programs; that is, it offers a universally understood and practiced standard fee schedule that insurance companies can adopt or easily modify by changing the dollar conversion factor or separating certain categories. Medicaid, BlueCross, and commercial insurance contracts that cover the 87 percent of the population under age 65 often base their payments on a modified form of the Medicare RBRVS or use Medicare payment levels as a benchmark(Getzen & Moore, 2007).
Spending for health care uses a greater part of the economies revenue: the national studies that have been done in the past decade depict that many citizens of the United States will have to make increasingly more disconcerting decisions in daily life and ability to obtain and afford adequate health care insurance for themselves and their families.
While there may be future opportunities to constrain those increasingly difficult choices there may be ways to decrease those problematic and health related choices. Health care spending in the United States far exceeds that of other countries. Approximately 14% of gross domestic product, or $1.6 trillion in 2002, is spent on health care services in the United States. Federal, state, and local governments pay for approximately 45 percent of total U.S. expenditures on health care; private insurance and other private spending account for 40 percent; and consumer out-of pocket spending accounts for the remaining 15 percent.(CSCBD,2010)
The national spending is in some areas more than it should be and relatively not enough in other areas. The cost of medications has risen along with the national averages in health care across the board. With this rise in even the most basic of price increase many can not even afford to get much needed antibiotics, several studies have shown that many women will defer taking birth control or taking a type of birth control that is best for the individual need because the health insurance that is covered by an employer or the private insurance that is carried does not cover the type of birth control that is best suited to the individuals need or any birth control at all. Because of such examples as this more Americans are going without necessary prescriptions more today than ten years ago, when statistically speaking more residents in the United States have some form of either government medical insurance, employer supplied, or privately held insurance.
Much of what is considered to be the largest offender for the over spending in the health care field is the fee-for-service system. In the fee-for-service system doctors and hospitals get paid for the amount of medical care given to patients and not the quality of that same medical care. There is no incintive for doctors nor hospitals or any other medical care facility to get rid of the waste of health care services, the only thing that would happen is that doctors and other medical workers and medical care facilities would simply get paid less. Because of this problem it is unlikely that the fee-for-service system will be changed any time soon even with the bills that are floating around through out the government system.
The economy being in the state that it is in the national averages give little inclination of where or why health care should be added to or cut. There is a national outcry for additional health care coverage while the demand in price of that same coverage to be cut in drastic measures. The rough estimate according to the Thomson Reuters (TRI) report for the United States is on average seven hundred billion dollars. This is believed by many to be spent on multitudes of treatments that are unnecessary and redone, clerical error, and of course fraud. With an estimated 46 million people in the United States uninsured if even a third of that seven billion dollars could be cut every one of those millions of people could receive health care.
Some of the cost cuts that are being suggested by President Barack Obama will not even go into effect until the latter months of 2013, because of this as is the same as the previous decade health care costs and spending if not put into check by other methods could easily continue to grow and double what history has already shown over the coming decade. This rough estimate is believed to possibly go as high as 5 trillion or more before the suggested legislature takes effect becoming almost an astounding 21% of the national average debt.