Question

Federal/state government (including Medicare and Medicaid) - Patients - Employers - Providers - Hospitals - Insurance companies - Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and similar healthcare plans. We are looking for ways to control healthcare costs and increasingly are demanding more efficiency in benefit programs. Pick one of these market players and describe a recent effort made to control costs. Was it successful? In your opinion, why or why not?

Answer 1

The healthcare industry is one of the vital industries around the globe that ensure the wellbeing of the whole society in a nation. Consequently, healthcare organizations encounter persistently changing circumstances and ever-rising requirements for their services. The United States healthcare industry consumers more of the nation’s expenditure in comparison to other healthcare industries in other developed nations. For instance, the United States healthcare industry consumption is 17.6% of the nation’s gross domestic product. Therefore, various stakeholders such as healthcare professional, citizens, and the federal government assess and breed approaches to enrich performance of the hospital and its productivity regarding the services provided by these healthcare organizations

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 refer to a law that significantly changed United States health care system. Affordable Care Act had 3 primary targets: increasing the number of the insured, decreasing the costs of health care and improving the quality of care. For the period from 2010 to 2017 the Affordable Care Act declined health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion. The health expenditures in year 2017 were $650 billion lower than projected, and the spending on health care was kept under 18 percent of GDP; thus a tad basically over where it was in 2010 when the act was passed. Moreover at the same time there was an expansion of health coverage to more than 20 million who were previously uninsured in U.S. The act has helped to bend the cost curve; and thus in my opinion it was successful