Health Care Spending

This article highlights how the recession in the economy greatly affects Health Care Spending. Private payers slow down and public spending greatly increases. Private payers can include self pay, group pay purchased per person, or employer-provided. In contrast, public spending is usually affected by age such as the elderly receiving medicare, financial status where people use medicaid, and special populations which include the dod or va for the military and veterans and more. Because of the recent recession, private spending is expected to go down and public spending is expected to increase. Not only does the economy affect the healthcare system, but the baby boomers are now requiring medicare, so public healthcare spending would increase. In the lecture, there is a graph that shows private health insurance was growing rapidly until 2007 but now the article states private payers are decreasing. This is not surprising as with low economies, more people are likely to become unemployed and lose their company insurance or are unable to afford expensive health insurances. The article also states public payers will pay for a little over half of the U.S.'s health care. This would lead to an increase of tax for everyone as more money is required for the public health care system. Medicine prices are also expected to decrease from the economy's crash. The bad economy has contributed to slower spending growth and rise in public spending such as medicaid instead of private health care.

Continued increases in healthcare spending would imply there are more patients using healthcare and receiving the care they need. But this also means more money is required for healthcare. Healthcare could be becoming more expensive from physicians, equipment, and medicine. National Health spending is greatly affected by purchase of health care goods and services. Continued proportional spending in public spending means more people are switching from private to public. This is due to the recession in the economy and more people becoming older and switching to medicare. Medicare is fully federal funded and medicaid is fifty percent state funded.Most of this money would come from taxes meaning the government would have to increase taxes even more. Healthcare could also become unaffordable for most people. Growth in medicare and medicaid means the economy is bad and less people are able to afford important things such as health care. In contrast, growth in private spending would mean the economy is better and more people are employed with employers' health insurances and living better.

There seems to be many problems with the US healthcare and its reform. Trillions are dollars are spent, yet the system is not perfect. Many people are still not receiving the basic healthcare they need. This could lead to graver diseases or situations and owing more money in the end. Huge public hospitals have closed from the economic recession. This is probably because general hospitals are more likely to have debt in emergency rooms and the patients are not likely to have health insurance. Although the US is a wealthy nation, not everyone is covered with insurance and its healthcare system is not as great as other countries'. If I could change one thing about the healthcare system, I would probably want to have universal coverage. This way, everyone could have insurance and there would be less problems with debts and being unable to pay. People who are uninsured are more likely to end up in the emergency room because they neglect their health and this would lead to greater costs for the government. People would not have to worry about health care based on financial status, age, or location. Infant mortality would probably go down and life expectancy would increase if everyone had insurance. Putting more emphasis on disease prevention could work too but it would probably only have short term effects and health care would end up right where it started.

I didn't know before how much the economy affected the US healthcare system. So much money is spent on healthcare but all this money just seems to disappear. Of course the article stated that these were just assumptions but it is scary to see how much more people will be paying for healthcare within the next decade. If this continues, I feel like more people will be unable to afford insurance and less people would be insured. I've heard many negative and positive responses of Britain's health care system. Although there are some cons to having a universal health care system, there are many good pros too. Less money is spent per person in Britain as opposed to the US so it is affordable for everyone. Also, Britain ranks above the US in healthcare. And if people really want private health care, they have the option to purchase their own and go to private hospitals. Maybe if the US followed Britain's example, there would be less problems within health care. Of course not every health care system can be perfect.