Health Care Costs are Still The Leading Cause of Bankruptcy

Last Updated: 15 Feb 2023
Pages: 5 Views: 68

The United States has one of the strongest military forces in the world, even being one of the most powerful nations in the world, it still has one of the worst healthcare systems among the developed countries. It is unfathomable that health care costs are still the number one cause for filing bankruptcies, “Bankruptcies resulting from unpaid medical bills will affect nearly 2 million people this year.” It is horrible that Americans still struggle to pay for their healthcare needs while living in one of the most powerful countries around the world. Our healthcare system needs to change, we pay way too much for our healthcare for comparatively fewer benefits than many other developed nations, and many of our people don’t even get to experience the full benefits of it. We need to move to a single-payer system like many other countries to reduce the unnecessary costs of healthcare and provide the basic healthcare necessities that every person should have a right to.

Our goal should be to provide equal healthcare benefits to every person living in this country. We need to create a system where no one has to worry about their finances if they get a serious illness or stress about how they will get the proper treatment. My long-term goal is to have a single-payer healthcare system in place, where the government would take charge of providing health insurance and healthcare financing to the people. Everyone would be under one health insurance, and health care costs would be covered by taxes and revenues from the government. The government insurance provider would negotiate with private healthcare providers on setting prices on everything from equipment costs to administrative costs and to prescription costs. This would reduce costs, increase efficiency and provide better health care to people while giving more choices at the same time.

Establishing a single payer healthcare system would require massive government oversight. The state scope would have to increase a lot, meaning that the state would have more influence in our healthcare than it ever had before. The state would have to create new regulations to combat this current health model, it would have more say on what companies can charge, and it would create more rules for the healthcare providers. It is necessary to increase the scope for us to have an effective healthcare system in our country, since private companies such as pharmaceutical companies may cause negative externalities for consumers. A negative externality is when a market activity causes others, who are not part of the transaction in this business gets hurt. With health providers not having to disclose costs of medical services such as medication, pharmaceutical companies could keep increasing their prices to make profit. But in the process, it raises prices for everyone overall, hurting the poor the most. A bigger state scope is needed to correct this market failure.

Order custom essay Health Care Costs are Still The Leading Cause of Bankruptcy with free plagiarism report

feat icon 450+ experts on 30 subjects feat icon Starting from 3 hours delivery
Get Essay Help

We need to first establish a base by reducing our health care costs. The problem with our current healthcare model is that there is no price competition in healthcare, “patients don't price-shop for doctors, lab tests, or procedures as they would for computers or television sets.”(Amadeo) We need to create a system where the patients know the price variation for different health providers. “There are prices on walls in doctors’ offices in France. In Australia, people are entitled to binding estimates before they go in for elective surgery,” said Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal. We need to create a system like that where transparency is paramount to our health services. This transparency will create a price competition, where different health providers fight with better price and quality for getting their patients. Because as of the dismal state we are in right now, the health providers can charge as much as they want, they can just send the bill to the insurance providers without having to worry about the consumer.

We also need to reduce the number of unnecessary tests on patients, which is much higher in the US than many other nations “Up to 42% of patients received unnecessary tests in one year, Gawande said.” (Lawrence, 2018) This is a classic case of perverse incentive, which is when an incentive that was designed to do good, turns out to do an unintended and undesirable outcome. In the medical system, it is designed so that the doctors provide proper healthcare by providing with a lot of tests to make sure there is nothing wrong with the patient, and in a lot of cases the patient even requests them to be sure. It is set out to give assurance to patients, but this has driven healthcare costs high because of things that we don’t need. We also need to regulate hospital mergers, “1,700 hospital mergers have occurred over the past 20 years” (Lawrence, 2018) which means less competition for price once again, big hospital gets consolidated and then they have a bigger control on setting the price, research shows that hospitals without competition has prices “12.5% higher” than those with.

All of these can be easily regulated if we had one insurer, and if that insurer had massive power to regulate the healthcare institutions to protect patients. A single payer is needed to decrease the price of our healthcare needs, and provide equal access to healthcare, which should be a basic right for a country such as ours. Right now, we have the Affordable Care Act, which is a step in the right direction to healthcare reform, it has increased coverage for people, and allowed patients with preexisting conditions to receive healthcare. But it doesn’t go far enough, the quality of healthcare is still low, and people have to still pay massive amounts out of their pockets.

Our healthcare problem is a collective action problem, which is a situation where all individuals would be better off cooperating, but each member have conflicting interests, and they may not do that action if its costly. Which is a problem we face in our current healthcare system, most people want healthcare, but they don’t want to pay higher taxes for it. A lot of people want healthcare without having to pay too much and doesn’t want freeloaders to mooch off them. It may take a bit more time for it to be more acceptable here, but it works great in other countries that provide socialized healthcare, the people are happy about it and life expectancy is up in many of those countries.

For example, looking at UK, they have a very thorough and well-run single payer healthcare system. The “government pays 80 percent of costs through general taxes” (Amadeo) and even run the hospitals there, with the doctors being employed by the state. 70% UK residents think the health service is going in the wrong direction, but not because of increased costing, it’s because of less funding in it. “We don’t have to spend less of our GDP than the other leading European economies on health. Our government has chosen to do this.”

The state of the healthcare reform is definitely changing in the as well, many democratic candidates for the 2020 election support a Medicare-for-all type of plan for the future. Some may worry that US citizens may have an adverse opinion on socialized healthcare, “80 to 85 percent of Americans are already covered by health insurance, and most of them are happy with what they’ve got.” But the times are changing and new polls paint a different picture, a recent poll from last year showed a 70% approval rate for a Medicare for all plan. Maybe people are easing up to this idea of a socialized medical care, and this could be the perfect time to try to achieve a single payer system for the US.

Cite this Page

Health Care Costs are Still The Leading Cause of Bankruptcy. (2023, Feb 15). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/health-care-costs-are-still-the-leading-cause-of-bankruptcy/

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Run a free check or have your essay done for you

plagiarism ruin image

We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. By continuing we’ll assume you’re on board with our cookie policy

Save time and let our verified experts help you.

Hire writer