Economic Inequality In Health Care

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Access: Health insurance coverage for those who cannot afford it
Timely use of health services to achieve the best health outcomes is defined as Access (Millman,1993). According to me, the definition of access to healthcare is broader. Accessibility cannot be achieved without affordability and availability of health services. An interventionist government can put in place some policies to ensure that equity is established in the society and make sure that people can have access to at least a minimal level of healthcare. I personally believe that the structure of society since the development of humankind has been in a way that it created a lot of economic inequality between the individuals. A government may not be able to immediately erase …show more content…

As we understand, insurance works by pooling of different individuals. If the number of individuals taking unnecessary risks which put their health in jeopardy and require healthcare services to correct the problems caused, the cost of premiums increase for the other people. It is well known that private insurers pay physicians a lot more than what Medicare pays them (Boccuti and Moon,2003) and similar trends have been observed in many other aspects. Private sector market can play a positive role in controlling the healthcare costs. They should move away from the fee for service methodology and adapt value based payment methodologies. As mentioned earlier, private sector market is one of the reasons for increased costs of healthcare. They should become transparent in terms of costs per service. This will also increase the free competition in healthcare and will control the …show more content…

Some examples like creating star ratings for Medicare advantage plans, moving towards the value based payments and bundled payments, emphasis on prevention and initiatives to tackle readmissions through ACA have played a major role in improving quality. A government which believes in not having laws in place/ fewer laws cannot improve the quality of care and none of the healthcare organizations might meet the quality standards as there is lack of incentives/penalties that would push them to improve

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