Homework Question on The Cost of Healthcare
- Besides the fee received from the actual patient visit how else do physical affect the cost of health care in the US?
Homework Answer on The Cost of Healthcare
Apart from the fees that patients pay to the hospitals, hospitals also get funding from other sources like the insurance companies (Appleby & Health News, 2012). Insurers pay hospitals, doctors and other healthcare providers under the program of the fee-for service, which reimburses these entities for any test that they carryout, the procedures done and any visit to the healthcare centre by patients. The US medical system is not well intergrated and this means that more cases of overtreatment are being encountered and hospitals are repeating their tests done on patients so as to increase their reimbursement from the insurers.
The federal health regulation, together with groups of private insurers have increased their efforts to make changes on the current trends in the health sector (Appleby & Health News, 2012). These groups aim at changing the health law to move payments to a standard rate that would apply only to some conditions and not all health cases. The conditions being targeted by these changes would include replacement of knees or even coverage to the entire period that a patient spends in the hospital.
The stakeholders in the health sector and the doctors are looking for new measures like the use of modern technologies. This would allow for more efficient record keeping and hence promotes accurate recording in the hospitals, it is believed that this would reduce the cases of repeated tests in the hospitals (Appleby & Health News, 2012). The insurers should also make efforts to change their policies, which seem to encourage healthcare providers to do more on their patients, rather than encourage efficiency and accountability.