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Impact of the aging population on healthcare
How is the older population impacting healthcare in the United States
Impact of the aging population on healthcare
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I believe aging is responsible for the growth of healthcare expenditures because the population will continue to grow so will the life expectancy continue to increase. The elderly population is living longer therefore they need advanced care such as nursing home. Hudson stated, “In 2011, total nursing home expenditures in the United States tOPPED $149 billion” (Hudson, 2014, p. 224). The largest payer of nursing home care in the United States is the Medicaid program and it’’s expenditures is more than $46 billion in 2011. As elderly population is living longer, elderly will eventually be at a nursing home which will only continue the growth of healthcare expenditures. Medicare is a growing source of funding for nursing homes, which in 2011 …show more content…
Medicaid provides home and community based services (HCBS) to approximately 800,000 individuals the waiver program for expenditures. The expenditures for waiver programs have expanded from $8.2 billion in 1997 to more than $35 billion in 2010 (Eiken et al., 2010). Two-thirds of Medicaid fund are assigned to nursing home care for older adults and individuals with physical disabilities, therefore the healthcare expenditures continue to grow. Allocating Medicaid expenditures to home and community based services (HCBS) has been more significantly for individuals with developmental disabilities, with the institutional/community ratio shifting to twenty five-percent and seventy-five percent is the home and community based service (HCBS) (Eiken et al., 2010). The disability population will not decrease but only increase therefore, there will be a growth on medicare expenditures due to disability expenses of treatment. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2006, disability associated healthcare expenditures accounted for 26.7% of all healthcare expenditures for adults who permanently lived in United States and totaled $397.8 billion (CDC,
Within the U.S. Healthcare system there are different levels of healthcare; Long-Term Care also known as (LTC), Integrative Care, and Mental Health. While these services are contained within in the U.S. Healthcare system, they function on dissimilar levels.
Health Care workers are constantly faced with legal and ethical issues every day during the course of their work. It is important that the health care workers have a clear understanding of these legal and ethical issues that they will face (1). In the case study analysed key legal and ethical issues arise during the initial decision-making of the incident, when the second ambulance crew arrived, throughout the treatment and during the transfer of patient to the hospital. The ethical issues in this case can be described as what the paramedic believes is the right thing to do for the patient and the legal issues control what the law describes that the paramedic should do in this situation (2, 3). It is therefore important that paramedics also
Long-term care (LTC) covers a wide range of clinical and social services for those who need assistance due to functional limitations. These limitations usually result from complications associated with age related chronic conditions, from disabilities related to birth defects, brain damage, or mental retardation in children; or from major illnesses or injuries suffered by adults (Shi L. & Singh D.A., 2011). LTC encompasses a variety of services including traditional clinical services, social services and housing. Unlike acute care, long-term care is much more complicated and has objectives that are much harder to measure. Acute care mainly focuses on returning patients to their previous functional level and is primarily provided by specialty providers. However, LTC mainly focuses on preventing the physical and mental deterioration of an individual and promoting social adjustments to suit the different stages of decline. In addition the providers of LTC are more diverse than those in acute care and is offered in both formal and informal settings, which include: hospitals, physicians, home care, adult day care, nursing home care, assisted living and even informal caregivers such as friends and family members. Long-term care services have been dominated by community based services, which include informal care (86%, about 10 to 11 million) and formal institutional care delivered in nursing facilities (14%, 1.6 million) (McCall, 2001). Of more than the 10 million Americans estimated to require LTC services, 58% are elderly and 42% are under the age of 65 (Shi L. & Singh D.A., 2011). The users of LTC are either frail elderly or disabled and because of the specific care needs of this population, the care varies based on an indiv...
The United States is projected to spend nearly 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product on healthcare by 2020.According to a Mckinsey study $447 billion of the 1.7 trillion the U.S. spent on healthcare in 2003 was in excess of what it should have spent based on its wealth. A 1 % increase in the rate of health-spending results in an increase of about $2 trillion in spending on health over the next 10 years.
Staff nurses in many medical settings such as Skilled Nursing Facilities are at the forefront of patient care. Many patients in these particular settings are typically suffering from some type of cognitive impairment often related to dementia syndrome, behavioral disturbances or prior mental health conditions. Many mental health symptoms are managed by second generation antipsychotics. This class of medication placed the patients at risk for metabolic syndrome.
For decades, one of the many externalities that the government is trying to solve is the rising costs of healthcare. "Rising healthcare costs have hurt American competitiveness, forced too many families into bankruptcy to get their families the care they need, and driven up our nation's long-term deficit" ("Deficit-Reducing Healthcare Reform," 2014). The United States national government plays a major role in organizing, overseeing, financing, and more so than ever delivering health care (Jaffe, 2009). Though the government does not provide healthcare directly, it serves as a financing agent for publicly funded healthcare programs through the taxation of citizens. The total share of the national publicly funded health spending by various governments amounts to 4 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, GDP (Jaffe, 2009). By 2019, government spending on Medicare and Medicaid is expected to rise to 6 percent and 12 percent by 2050 (Jaffe, 2009). The percentages, documented from the Health Policy Brief (2009) by Jaffe, are from Medicare and Medicaid alone. The rapid rates are not due to increase of enrollment but growth in per capita costs for providing healthcare, especially via Medicare.
Area I have selected for the field is Long-Term Acute Care Hospital (LTACH) specializing in pediatrics. Long-Term Acute Care Hospital, specializes in treatment for special needs such as patients with concurrent acute illnesses, recovering from acute illness due to multisystem failures, requires direct care by multiple specialists, ventilator services (weaning or decannulation), needing of daily physician visits or have complex respiratory-relevant diagnoses. Which in terms focuses on patients who have complex medical problems and the rehabilitation needs that one may require special or intensive treatment over an extended period of time. Patients who come to LTACH have been in an ICU or CCU at a hospital and now require specialized care (as
Medicare and Medicaid are one of important government programs. According to Medicaid.gov site, there are more than 4.6 million low-income seniors enrolled in Medicare and about 8.3 million people that are enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. Anyone that enrolled with Medicare and limited income and resources are eligible to get assistance paying for their premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses from Medicaid. Not only does Medicaid cover additional services, but, services covered by both programs are first paid by Medicare with Medicaid in the difference up to the state’s payment limit (Medicaid.gov, 2015) .
An aging population is indeed a problem for the society and will possibly cause many social and economic difficulties in the future. According to David Foot (2003), professor of Economics at University of Toronto, an effective birth rate of 2.2% against current 1.75% will be necessary to replace the current work force in the near future and the government’s policy of bringing in more immigrants will eventually fail (Foot, 2003, 2). However some people predict that the increased size of an aging population will drive growth in the home, health care, and many other industries resulting in job creation and economic growth (Marketwire, 2013, 1). Majority of the people are of the opinion that the issue will be mainly in the health care and economic activity. As humans age, they start to develop health problems, leading to more visits to a medical clinic putting extra burden on health care system.
There are many who believe that the next shortage will be worse and the demand for nurses will increase. There will be more jobs available especially with the baby boomer nurses retiring. Wood believes that when nurses retire, the next shortage could be even worse than the previous shortage. According to Wood this would lead to an “intellectual drain of institutional and professional nursing knowledge” (Wood, 2011, para 15). Staiger agrees as well that a shortage of nurses is expected again when nurses retire and since the economy will be more stable full-time nurses will go back to being part-time (Huston, 2017). Huston expects for the supply of nurses to grow minimally in the next couple of years and for a large number of nurses
8. The demand and supply factors that contribute health care to rise in cost are the rising incomes, aging people, unhealthy lifestyles and the role of doctors.
... more prone to chronic illnesses. As for Medicaid, it needs to improve its chronic care management. Chronic care management should be made more affordable to those with chronic illnesses (Baicker, Katherine, & Amy Finkelstein, 2011). This way, the program will be more beneficial to more people. The program should also introduce, and support home and community based services. Providing care in home settings will be much cheaper than nursing homes. Moreover, Medicaid needs to come up with customized beneficiary services. Patients’ needs are not equal. Therefore, Medicaid should be flexible enough to abandon the one size fits all mentality. Anyway, that notwithstanding, we cannot ignore the fact that Medicare and Medicaid have revolutionized healthcare in the United States. Giving credit where it is due, these two programs continue to save millions of helpless lives.
The participation in leisure activities, such as dance, is related with a reduced risk of development of dementia, both Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia (Verghese et al., 2003). Dementia is “a general term that describes a group of symptoms-such as loss of memory, judgment, language, complex motor skills, and other intellectual function-caused by the permanent damage or death of the brain's nerve cells, or neurons” (Alzheimer’s Foundation of America [AFA], 2015, para 1). Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia in persons over the age of 65, representing about 60 percent of all dementias. Dementia is specifically characterized by “different pathologic, or structural, changes in the brain, such as an accumulation of
There are three issues when it comes to the health care cost rising. The first is the rising cost in prescription drugs. The second area of rising cost is the increased technologies when it comes to the medical industry. The third problem is the aging population. Prescription drugs are the area of the fastest growing health care expense, and it is projected to grow at 20 to 30 percent each year over the next several years. There are many newer, more expensive drugs on the market, and the use of these prescriptions is exploding. In addition, with so much television advertising, many consumers ask their doctors for expensive, brand name drugs when there may actually be a generic drug that works just as well.
It involves the mental, physical, emotional, and medical domains of the individual’s life, but due to the fact that many of these services are publicly funded, gaps exist. Cox (2007) reported that “community resources were generally perceived as inadequate. None of our participants had ready access to social workers in the office, so arranging home health care, adult day care, and other community services added to the difficulty of primary care” (p. 82). Not only are the services and programs inadequate, recent economic dilemmas and ‘recession’ has reduced public spending to meager allowances. Another sore problem is Medicare and general health care programs for the less wealthy. This was the sentiment echoed by one physician interviewed: “If you told me I had to run this place on the basis of what I get from Medicare, I would have to tell you I couldn’t do it, which is kind of sad, because they claim that they’re bankrupt and everything. Where in the hell are they spending their money? They sure ain’t giving it to