Healthcare Spending and GDP With the Renewed

Healthcare spending and GDP

With the renewed comprehensive healthcare system, the obvious challenge that came with it is how to finance it. The huge projections of the financial inputs needed to efficiently run the program portends a challenge to the government and is likely to spin out of control and be unaffordable in the long run after a few decades from now. This is informed by accompanying supplies and services increasing in cost like the essential original drugs that have been noted to have increased in prices among other services within the healthcare. In many countries people are expected to pay for their own health care. Therefore the ability of people to pay for their health care or the affordability of the healthcare has become a policy issue in many countries and especially an issue of urgency. The issue of healthcare spending has been a topic for debate over the past few years. Today, there is a lot of concern on healthcare issues one of them being the healthcare spending. The cost of healthcare has been going up and it is still projected to rise. Presently it is about a fifth of the economic activity of the U.S. this paper will look at the causes of high healthcare costs and tools that can be used to address economic challenges in the heath care industry. It will finally determine the most effective solution.

Factors leading to high costs of healthcare

There are many factors that contribute to the rising costs of healthcare. This include first the fact that many people in America lack health insurance at any costs and they cannot even manage to afford what is termed as the most basic health coverage. There has been a rise in the number of uninsured people due to the fact that the per capita healthcare spending has gone up. It can also be attributed to the fact that many people have lost their jobs and the fact that the economy is poor.

Rise in healthcare spending can also be attributed to the use of improved technology, vaccine improvement, antibiotics, introduction of disease care as well as advances in surgery. There have also been improved medical devices like CT scanners, MRI, ultrasounds and defibrillators that can be implanted. At the same time there are developments in pharmaceuticals and administration costs have also contributed to the rise in costs of healthcare. Mostly the heath care costs are due to medical technology which is approximately over 200 billion per year (Wayne, 2012).