Health Care Cost

The cost of health care can often have people scratching their head wondering how it has gotten so expensive. With every surpassing year, health care cost has been increasingly getting higher and more complicated. The increasing cost is also affecting the American citizen’s access to medical care. Consequently, the rising medical expenses are contributing to the quality of the health care provided. The quality of care can be evaluated by analyzing the past and future rising medical cost, effects on accessing care, and how these issues may affect the future quality of medical care.
Health care has been experiencing an increase in medical cost every year and is a hot topic for the American people today. The beginning of the rise in health

One of the factors is the rapid growth of medical science and technology advancement because patients assume that new technology is always better, and physician and hospital feel the need to outdo their competition. The cost to purchase and have a new medical technology available for patients’ increases the health care facility’s overhead leading to higher medical cost for the patients (chap. 10). Also, there is a decrease in primary physicians and an increase in specialty physicians, and the problem with this is that specialty physicians charge more for their services (chap.3). The elderly populations are growing rapidly with the new advances in medical technology, however, with an increase in life expectancy also increases cost for health care because of the additional elderly citizens on Medicare. Also, there is currently a multiplayer complex health care system in the United States (U.S.); unfortunately, the complexity of a system has a high possibility of mistakes occurring within the steps in the system which contributes to increasing in costs (chap. 12). Medicaid expansion is improving the quality of care for low-income citizens. However, there has been an increase in Medicaid new patient diagnosis of chronic health conditions that increase

Access to care for American citizens ten years ago was significantly worse than it is today; however, there is still flaws within the system that are contributed to cost. Ten years ago, there were no restrictions on operating or opening physician-owned hospitals which are an ethical issue and can have an adverse effect on medical cost and access to care. Now there are restrictions on expanding physician-owned hospitals, and no more physician-owned hospitals can be opened (chap. 8). Also, the Medicaid and Medicare programs were less complex, and the U.S. citizens that were eligible could gain access to care. There used to be only Medicaid for children, and the children that that did not meet the requirements did not have health coverage. Ow children that do not meet the Medicate requirements can apply for Children’s Health Insurance Program (chap. 10). Today Medicaid helps a lot more people gain access to health care because of the expansion. However, there is still 30% out of 27.2 million people that do not meet all the requirements to get Medicaid, or they are unable to because they are immigrants (Rowland & Lyons, 2016). Physicians can refuse care to anyone and can refuse certain payment methods. However, acceptable payment methods are usually already established, and patients are usually notified when trying to access care from the physician. Although, many physicians believe it is their duty to