Factors Contributing to Rising Health Care Costs

Rising health care costs has been a topic for many years, despite all the discussions, costs continue to rise. Here are some of the factors which could affect the rise of health care costs.

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1) Health insurance industry – Insurance has grown and has had a great impact on health care costs. As is commonly known, private insurance has not provided sufficient coverage for medical care, particularly in such settings as the home, partial hospitalization, and psychiatric rehabilitation programs.

2) Advances in medical car technology – expensive technologies may not be always applicable to medical care. However, patients are compelled to avail of these technologies because they have this mind set that these technologies provide better and assured service, whatever the cost may be. Of course, state of the art facilities like these are most of the time very expensive.

3) Changes in US demographics – the number of births and deaths, especially the aging population has a great impact on increasing healthcare costs.

Elderly patients, who are admitted, have complex discharge problems that often result in a longer length of stay than is typically required, even though their length of stay is decreasing due to pressures to discharge quickly.

Moreover, their conditions are more likely to be more complicated thus making their healthcare costs even higher. 4) Government support for healthcare – the government has a vital role in helping reduce the increasing healthcare costs today. Especially in the high costs of pharmaceuticals for example; since patients have to take long term medications and many of these are expensive.

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Pharmaceutical companies argue that the cost of medications is due to high research and development costs. The government should then do their part to compensate the other finances of medicine to these companies to make it cost reasonably in the market. Professional fees of physicians could also be applied here as well.

5) Consumer expectations – with too much expectation, consumers tend to have discontent on certain medical services thus make them seek for 2nd opinion. These actions make them spend twice and even thrice the cost of the medical services. Discontent on immediate recoveries also applies here (Finkelman, 1997).

Reference:

Finkelman, A. W. (1997). Psychiatric Home Care. Gaithersburg, Maryland: Jones & Bartlett Publishers.