As health care costs escalate, households may feel under strain and allocate less of their income toward other goods and services. This puts additional strain on consumer budgets.
Increased prices also have negative repercussions for businesses, including reduced wage increases or increasing the number of part-time and temporary employees, which ultimately lower profits.
Affordability
Health care is an intricate network of services and products. It requires coordination among many professionals – doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, hospitals, insurers, device suppliers, researchers, etc. – as well as many different organizations and individuals involved.
The Affordable Care Act created a balance of power between consumers, providers and for-profit and nonprofit insurers – giving individuals more control in choosing how they purchase coverage and health care services. It broadened access to quality yet cost-effective health insurance options; further limiting out-of-pocket expenses like deductibles, copayments and out-of-pocket limits among private plans; increasing quality yet cost-effective health coverage options across America – giving all Americans choices on how they purchase coverage and access health care services.
Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid help households and businesses reduce the financial strain caused by healthcare for elderly and low-income individuals, thus keeping wages higher while stimulating economic growth to benefit individuals, families, and communities alike.
But high health care costs also damage the economy in other ways. When workers become sick, productivity suffers and financial drag on the economy is many times greater than direct costs for health care provision; indirect costs such as lack of preventative measures even further compound this financial strain on an economy.
American healthcare spending consumes comparatively large sums, limiting other activities like education and infrastructure. Furthermore, increased borrowing to finance health care causes interest rates to increase among both firms and households – hurting economic activity by making capital-raising more costly for all involved. High health care costs particularly burden low-income households, Black and Hispanic adults as well as women; nearly one quarter of adults reported they or someone in their household has skipped medical tests/treatments or reduced pill dosage due to cost issues.
Access
Lacking access to healthcare is a serious burden on American society, making progress against many health conditions like HIV/AIDS, cancer, obesity, sedentary lifestyles and aging more difficult than necessary. Without insurance or fearing their job might be at stake or worry over malpractice rates; poor people, low-income families, homeless people, minority groups and rural residents all experience barriers preventing timely lifesaving healthcare from being received promptly and timely.
Although tracking access to health services is essential, data on barriers are limited, inconsistently reported, underanalyzed or outdated. Even when adequate information exists it is rarely collected and made accessible in such a way that promotes systematic thinking on how best to approach problems or address them.
An effective analytic strategy for monitoring access involves using patient zip code information to disaggregate hospital discharge data by neighborhood. Unfortunately, this approach suffers from two key limitations: it relies on income information which may be unavailable or imprecise and it fails to capture geographical disparities in poverty.
Health insurance claims data could provide another avenue of access information; however, this approach has several significant drawbacks: the data are incomplete and inconsistent; secondly, analyzing them is too expensive. There are ongoing efforts underway to develop better data for claims analysis aided by computerized medical records.
Healthcare should not only be accessible to those with money. While the Affordable Care Act has made strides toward this end goal, further improvements remain.
Preventative Care
Last month, a Texas judge invalidated the Affordable Care Act’s preventive services mandate. If this ruling stands, 150 million American would lose access to free preventive services. Plaintiffs in this lawsuit claimed that the Affordable Care Act gave too much power to three professional bodies when it came to selecting which preventive services were covered, and these entities weren’t appointed in an impartial fashion. On this edition of On Point, my guest is Mark Fendrick from the University of Michigan’s Departments of Medicine and Public Health who helped draft preventive care provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Today we will explore his thoughts on making data-driven policy decisions regarding healthcare.
First step to developing effective preventive services is identifying which ones should be, then tracking how frequently people actually utilize them. Unfortunately, only 8 percent of adults currently undergo preventive screenings regularly – which is an alarming statistic, considering research shows early detection can improve health outcomes and decrease medical costs while healthy employees tend to be more productive at work; according to one Institute of Medicine report alone, indirect costs of absenteeism due to untreated illness amount to over $1 trillion per year in America alone!
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers a list of recommended preventive services, such as cancer screenings for breast and colon, routine vaccines, counseling to quit smoking or lose weight and accessing contraception without cost sharing – ensuring maternal and infant health improvements and cost savings in America. Ultimately, preventing chronic disease while improving health outcomes is the best way to lower our nation’s spiraling healthcare costs.
Treatment
Many Americans believe a high-quality health care system is necessary in order to receive optimal treatment options; however, American’s health outcomes lag far behind those in other nations; our nation ranks lowest when it comes to life expectancy at birth, death rates from preventable or treatable causes and one of the world’s highest infant and maternal mortality rates.
Many Americans face difficulty accessing adequate healthcare due to limited coverage, while even those who do have insurance often incur high out-of-pocket costs for prescription medication. The Affordable Care Act has substantially decreased these expenses by mandating most marketplace plans cover essential health benefits, expanding Medicaid drug rebate programs, and permitting consumers to count out-of-pocket prescription costs towards deductibles.
Lack of access to health care leads to many negative repercussions for individuals and the economy alike. Large airlines and restaurant chains alike are finding that rising healthcare costs threaten their profitability, leading them to cut employee benefits or reduce them altogether, shifting the burden onto individuals thereby decreasing disposable income and potentially slowing economic growth.
As one of only several developed nations without universal health coverage, the US stands out among wealthy countries by not providing universal coverage and its uninsured rate is higher than most developed nations. Without coverage, individuals without coverage are more likely to delay or avoid care and incur more long-term expenses; noncitizens are especially prone to being uninsured, with noncitizens being three times as likely (33% vs 20% respectively) or go without needed medical treatment due to costs being too costly (7% vs 10% respectively). But thanks to the Affordable Care Act’s implementation through Medicaid expansion and marketplaces providing private coverage, this dynamic has changed considerably;
Prevention
To promote good health for all, healthcare workers must deliver quality, person-centred primary care while policymakers invest in universal coverage – this can only happen if health systems prioritize disease and illness prevention in their local communities and are adequately resourced.
Research demonstrates that most chronic diseases are preventable, and that effective interventions can lower their prevalence and risks among populations. This includes both primordial or preventative measures – like lifestyle modifications and public health programs (e.g. dietary advice or vaccinations) to lower risk factors – and secondary preventive strategies, like screening early signs of disease such as cholesterol or blood pressure levels in an individual or population.
Ten years ago, the Affordable Care Act required private health plans to offer evidence-based preventive services without patient cost sharing. While these services have proven their worth in early identification of illnesses and managing them more effectively to save lives and improve health outcomes, their use remains inconsistent across health systems.
Lack of appropriate training for physicians in providing preventive services is one reason. Furthermore, many don’t have enough time or resources to stay current with evidence-based recommendations and may miss opportunities to offer such services to their patients. Promoting telehealth and making treatment guidelines more widely accessible are just two strategies that could ensure physicians stay abreast of evidence-based practices.
Health systems can only be as strong as the people they serve. There are healthier states than others, and if you are curious about where California is placed on this list check out this article published in iHeart.
Additionally, many individuals do not possess sufficient financial security to cover unexpected healthcare costs. Too often an illness forces them to sell assets or borrow – jeopardizing both their futures and those of their children. By investing in preventive healthcare we can increase economic performance of the country as a whole and make Americans more competitive in global marketplace.
