Question

1. Discuss controversies surrounding the development of the government’s role in providing, financing, and regulating health insurance and health services.

2. Discuss the changing nature of health and medical care and the implications for medical practice, medical education and research, and health policy.

3. Discuss the economic reasons for government intervention in a market based health care system. Please be sure to incorporate the reasons identified in your text as well as any additional reasons you wish to provide. Provide a critique of these reasons.

4. Capturing economies of scale is often offered as a reason for the consolidation of hospitals. In theory, if there are economics of scale, consolidation should result in cost savings for hospitals. What do the empirical studies mentioned in your text imply about consolidation for hospitals and cost savings? If not for cost savings, what other benefits are there for consolidations of hospitals.?

5. Discuss the structure, conduct and performance of the pharmaceutical industry. How does its structure, conduct and performance impact patients? Given the structure, conduct and performance of the pharmaceutical industry, predict the responsiveness of the industry to a common disease as compared to a very rare disease. Assume both diseases have very similar impacts on patients.

Answer 1

Solution 1

Governments are generally disregarded for thr fact that due to inconsistent execution of policies and poorly designed regulatory framework many healthcare treatment can get unaffordable and unaccessible. Some other concerns include supply shock of services and fraudulent activities and poor governance by Public sector hospitals.

Solution 2

Healthcare and medicare has seen drastic innovation like genetic modification, robotic surgery, real time checkups, health trackibg, preductive failures, etc. Thus has widely boosted immunity and shelf life and average age for nations as well as reduced mortality rates.

Solution 3

Government intervention becomes necessarily when policies are poorly governed or implemented and results in scams or fraudulent activities. Also when price rigging or excessive premium pricing is observed and when quality gets deteriorated the government steps in to adrress such economic issues faced.

Solution 4

Consolidation is not merely for cost savings, it is largely to reduce competitive market and increase concentration to create monopolistic market. Also to derive synergies and revenue maximisation with integrated customer base are some other primary reason for consolidation as proven empirically for all mergers between hospital.

Solution 5

Pharmaceutical industry faces stiff perfection competition however entry barriers are moderate since even generic drug makers have reduced market concentration and market shares of large companies. Structure wisr the industry has no incentive to suggest cheapest price of medicines and neither are insurance companies ready to pay for higher price firms and thus prices are more or less on higher end. Performance wise value of shipment and inventory have trebled from 1994 to 2014.HHI index ranges from 250 to 450.

The industry generally imitates products when common disease are observed however there are slight altercation to development and effects of product on patients.