Economics and Healthcare:
Incentivizing Better Healthcare Choices
Although health is priceless, affording good health and healthcare has grown increasingly costly, particularly in the United States. Stakeholders with an interest in improving both the populations health while still keeping healthcare costs contained include patients, patients families, providers, employers who provide health insurance to employees and wish to keep employees sick days at a minimum, insurance providers, and government policy-makers. Healthcare considerations encompass reducing the pervasiveness of chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, as well as reducing the spread of infectious disease. These concerns are not limited to the current concerns about coronavirus but also the spread of measles, mumps, and other diseases once thought to be eradicated by vaccination.
It is true that economic incentives to encourage good health can be used to promote healthy behavior. These may include techniques using positive and negative reinforcement. In terms of positive reinforcement, offering care at little or no cost, such as subsidized health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA), free vaccines to promote the public good, and free public health screening would all be considered direct economic incentives designed to improve population health, reducing the immediate economic pain to seeking out screening and earl treatment. Negative economic reinforcers include so-called sin...
…health, which can be more difficult to conceptualize.From a healthcare standpoint, reducing primary care costs is critical. Incentivizing wellness behaviors is ultimately more effective than using more intensive secondary and tertiary treatments to address illness once it has manifested. There are also more general, less tangible benefits to increasing overall health of the population, including reduced sick time from work, reduced stress and anxiety, overall improved quality of life, and even increased socioeconomic mobility, as healthier people are better able to work for their personal and family social betterment (Hale, 2000). Behavioral economics is not a perfect solution, but it can be used as one…
References
Hale, J. (2000). What contribution can health economics make to health promotion? HealthPromotion International, 15(4) 341-348.
Hostetter, M. & Klein, S. (2020). In focus: Using behavioral economics to advance populationhealth and improve the quality of health care servicesCommonwealth Fund. Retrieved from: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-article/focus-using-behavioral-economics-advance-population-health-and
Healthcare Health Care Law Ethics Health care over the years has become one of the most important debates to take place within the United States of America. This fact holds particularly true for the major part of the Obama Administrations whose New Health Care policies has been criticized extremely (Zhi Qu, 2010). The world, however, is still waiting for the final curtain to rise and to witness the climax which would be
Healthcare Economics Overall Healthcare And Economics Healthcare economics: Current challenges from a nursing perspective Although the subject of healthcare economics has been hotly-debated, on one issue there is widespread agreement: the aging of the population will substantively increase the demand for healthcare in the near and far future. As the population worldwide is aging and living longer, the need for essential services over a longer lifespan will generate more costs for an already-beleaguered
Health Care As human beings, our health and longevity have never been better. Many people today live to 100 years and beyond, and often in good and active health. One of the major reasons for this is better health care and more access to health care for more people. On the other hand, however, many people do not have access to the same health care services as others. Often, the main
With that in mind, even more changes will be coming to the planet in the near future. Even within the next 10 years, those changes are going to become more obvious and the health of people who are ingesting these chemicals and modified foods will likely begin to decline. When that gets coupled with the obesity epidemic, there will be a generation that will not live as long as
Health Care Professionals Healthcare professionals The paper is based on the healthcare professionals. It starts by analyzing the reasons why there may be physician shortage rather than a surplus in the United States. The paper as well analyses the factors that contribute to the nursing shortage in the U.S. And the roles of health professionals within the health care system. Lastly it covers the roles of a health service administrator within health
Healthcare Issues, Systems, And Policies America, once the global leader in the health of its population and among the nations with the highest quality and most readily available healthcare services, has now fallen behind almost twenty other countries, including some that only became industrialized in the last third of the 20th century, and with substantial assistance from the United States. While most other so-called "First-World" nations have already embraced several fundamental
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now