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Thesis rising health care costs
Conclusion of increasing healthcare costs
The real reason why healthcare costs are on the rise
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Recommended: Thesis rising health care costs
It’s no secret that the price of health insurance is rising every year with no regards to the cost of living. With the stresses of keeping up with the bi-laws of the ACA, employers are finding themselves in a tight position when it comes to contributing to health insurance plans for their employees. Employment agencies are starting to notice that providing health coverage benefits to employees at a reasonable costs is not an easy task. To date, the majority of the population in the US receives health insurance coverage through their employer for themselves and their dependents. Health insurance premiums have been steadily increasing over the past few years, requiring larger contributions from employers thus affecting their bottom line. …show more content…
Defined-contribution plans and consumer-directed high deductible plans are both designed to make employees select health insurance based upon price (Galvin 2016). However, both plans have varying qualities. The defined contribution plans affect employees during their yearly coverage selection. Employees are allowed to buy up or down depending on the fixed employer’s contribution to a specific benefit design. While this may seem beneficial, once an employer contributes less, the number of available services and providers decrease for individuals to choose …show more content…
For instance, the premiums are higher because each person is allowed to choose which plan that they feel is right for them. Sometimes people disregard prices until the last minute. Secondly, the payment for the health plan comes from after-tax dollars opposed to pre-taxed dollars seen with group plans (Pauly et. al 1999). Poor financial planning can put pressure on already strained pockets for individuals that choose this option. Therefore it is important for those pursuing individualized health plans to financially plan ahead. In terms of controlling costs for individual parties, these plans allow much more freedom and flexibility and allow for premiums to be purchased based on a specific need and not a generalized
This could be controversial, if older, sicker people who need the coverage most enter the market, but younger groups decline to do so. The insurance pool will be unbalanced and the cost of coverage will rise correspondingly. The process of choosing a health insurance provider should be more consumer friendly. People covered by their employer can clear their doubt about health insurance by conversing with the Human Resource department, whereas people who buy through marketplaces or health insurance exchanges, as in the case of ACA, may not have any resource to give further explanation.
What is managed care? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, managed care is “a system of health care in which patients agree to visit only certain doctors and hospitals, and in which the cost of treatment is monitored by a managing company.” Managed care is a variety of techniques designed to reduce the cost of providing health benefits and advance the quality of care. In the United States alone, there are various managed care programs, that are ranged from more restrictive to less restrictive. As stated in the National Institutes of Health, the future of managed care is uncertain. It is enthralling to note that in spite of the advances in healthcare systems, such as our hospital’s ability to provide patients with lower cost, managed
Out of all the industrialized countries in the world, the United States is the only one that doesn’t have a universal health care plan (Yamin 1157). The current health care system in the United States relies on employer-sponsored insurance programs or purchase of individual insurance plans. Employer-sponsored coverage has dropped from roughly 80 percent in 1982 to a little over 60 percent in 2006 (Kinney 809). The government does provide...
The cost and administrative burden of providing health care benefits to employees has grown rapidly in the last several years, and organizations have opted to cheaper means of doing this by resorting to CDHPs programs that are little bit cheaper when using deductible health insurance plans. This has led to the hope of healthier generation in the near future as the cost of health services would be manageable (Buntin, Damberg, Haviland & Kapur, 2006).
The United States spends vast amounts on its healthcare, while falling short of achieving superiority over other developed nations. One cannot overlook that the deepening recession has left many without jobs and therefore lacking health insurance. According to Fairhall and Steadman, (2009), even though the recession is hard on all, it is worse on the uninsured due to health care and insurance cost rising faster than incomes. Nevertheless, even those with jobs are lacking in health insurance due to employers, who provide insurance, are increasingly dropping their sponsored insurance. Many find that purchasing a health policy or paying for medical care out-of-pocket is cost prohibitive. “Since the recession began in December 2007, the number of unemployed Americans has increased by 3.6 million,” (Fairhall & Steadman, 2009). In 2009 it was stated that approximately 46 million Americans were uninsured, however not all of that number is due to the inability to afford coverage. According to a 2009 story written by Christopher Weaver of Kaiser Health News, 43% of that number should be classified as “voluntarily” uninsured. This subset of uninsured Americans consist of nearly half being young and healthy; therefo...
Luckily under the new health care reform law, most people will receive help paying for their healthcare premiums and cost-sharing expenses that people with insurance have to pay out of pocket for doctor visits, and prescription medicine. Families and individuals will be able to receive this assistance with incomes between one hundred and four hundred percent of the federal poverty line. One hundred to four hundred percent makes up at about $23,000 to $94,000 a year assume this is for a family of four.
Such rising health care costs penalize the citizens within our nation in multiple aspects. The first set of individuals that are affected are families and seniors because it affects the amount of money that goes into their pockets, which results in a difficult time balancing food, rent, and the basic necessities for living. Next, small businesses and fortune 500 employers are affected because such increased costs cause rising health care costs to become more expensive to add new employees to their payroll and more difficult to cover retiree fees when that time comes. Finally, the federal, state, and local governments are forced to increase Medicare and Medicaid costs, which results in cutting other priority funding such as public safety and education.
Although the insurance market should offer more attainable health insurance for everyone, with the healthcare reform act insurance companies have increased their rates to levels that many people cannot even pay. However, because the government is requiring people to get insurance and keep insurance from year to year, they have no other choice but continue to pay insurance premiums to at least have the bare minimum coverage as required to prevent being subjected to penalties (Health Reform Database: Explanation of
Health insurance is currently an important issue in the United States. Everyday more and more Americans become uninsured due to job loss and an increase in premiums. These Americans add to the ever growing population of 45.7 million people who are currently uninsured (Bialik). Moreover only 27% of those uninsured are under the age of 65 (NCHC). This is staggering considering most of those who are uninsured have, or soon will, suffer from some sort of illness or injury. As a result they will not be able to afford proper treatment. Insurance premiums can range in cost from fifty dollars per month, to fifteen hundred dollars per month (Kreidler). An individual’s premium is determined by factors they choose as well as other factors looked at by their provider. The cost of health insurance in America varies depending on the controllable factors, like particular insurance policies, and uncontrollable factors, like age.
American people look at their insurance bills, co-pays and drug costs, and can't understand why they continue to increase. The insured should consider all of these reasons before getting upset. In 2004, employee health care premiums increased over 11 percent, four times more than the rate of inflation. In 2003, premiums rose 10.1 percent and in 2002 they rose 15 percent. Employee spending for coverage increased 126 percent between 2000 and 2004. Those increases were lower than expected. (National Coalition on Health Care, 2005, Facts on health care costs). Premiums have risen five times faster than workers wages, on average. If medical spending continues to rise by just two percent more than personal income, by 2040 Medicare and Medicaid would hit 18.5 percent of the gross domestic product, leading the federal deficit to be 20.7 of the gross domestic product. (Melcer, R., 2004, St Louis Post-Dispatch, Rising Costs of healthcare pose huge challenges).
The steady rise of healthcare costs and the ever increasing cost of health insurance premiums are making it harder and harder for employers to pay healthcare premiums for their employees. In the past, it was almost a given that employers picked up the tab for health insurance coverage. The health coverage was usually exceptional with little or no money paid out of pocket by the individual for the insurance premiums. Those appear to be the “good old days”, with fewer and fewer employers shelling out money for health insurance premiums and demanding a larger percentage to be paid by the employee. Other employers are simply unable to financially provide healthcare coverage for their employees and have stopped all together.
Ans 1) To mandate the insurance or not is a big question to be answered and still there are a lot of problems associated with mandating the Health Insurance in United States. A lot of views have been given by people regarding whether there is need of mandating the Health Insurance or not.
Then came the question, should the employer be the one responsible for providing health insurance. While everyone on the panel could agree that our health care system in 2008 was broken, most seemed opposed to the alternative solution of universal healthcare. There is an incentive to the company to offer health insurance to a human being that may receive the opportunity to receive health insurance from another company. However, taking health insurance responsibility away from the employer and making it the government’s responsibility would increase availability and possibly eliminate freedom of
The main advantage of the Affordable Care Act is that it lowers health care costs overall by making insurance affordable for more people. First, it wi...
Since the 60s, government budgets have been influenced by the need to finance healthcare especially the cost of Medicare and Medicaid benefits. According to CMS’ National Health Expenditure Projections , total health care expenditures have grown by an average of 2.5 percentage points faster per year than the nation‘s Gross Domestic Product. For about 60 percent of workers who receive some form of health care coverage from their employers, the cost of their health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses have increased significantly faster than their own wages; and between 1999 and 2008, both average health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs for deductibles, co-payments for medications, and co-insura...