Contributing Factors to the Cost of Healthcare

A big thing in healthcare in the United States is how much it costs. It has become a problem because it is unaffordable to some people. It causes people to become medically bankrupt and unable to get the care they need, meaning that this is a big problem. Now there are a lot of factors that contribute to this. 

There are a few things that contribute to the high cost of healthcare. The first is that America has a fee-for-service payment system. This means that for every service someone receives they are billed for it and the more services they receive the bigger the bill is. Another contributing factor is that Americans use more technology for medicine, meaning that a lot of money is spent on that technology. Americans pay a lot for prescription drugs and are the top consumers of them. The price of prescription medication is not regulated by the U.S. Government and there are government-protected monopoly rights for manufacturers of prescription drugs. The government also has very few regulations to control costs in all parts of the medical field. The last thing that contributes to the cost of healthcare is the lack of transparency. Most of the time people won't know costs until they receive the bill. Bills come at different rates for the same services depending on who your insurance provider is. Although there are a lot of factors that contribute to healthcare costs the Affordable Care Act has done some things to help reduce those costs. The Affordable Care Act has added some consumer protection, and subsidies were also offered as a way to help low-income families and people pay for their health insurance.

In my Interview with Pong Velasquez, who is the CFO of Nursing Resource Home Health Services, stated that he thinks its the fraud that contributes to the high cost of healthcare. He said, "Everybody was like, you know, just hitting the insurance one time and then leave the country and stuff like that." Fraud is what makes healthcare cost so much. Although, he does say that the Affordable Care Act has put in some measures to prevent fraud from happening.

In my Interview with Congresswoman Fletcher, she talks about how unevenness in coverage is affecting the cost of healthcare. She puts it best by saying, "There is, first of all, different people are paying different amounts for the home, the same care because you have so many different players kind of negotiating. Take, for example, a hospital visit or how hospital works when they are delivering care, which seems to be the most expensive care... the rates are higher for people with insurance because the hospital treats people who don't have insurance and have to absorb that cost in operating cost. So they know people who have Medicare are going to pay in a certain way. People who have insurance are going to pay at a different rate. And people who don't have any insurance at all are going to pay, you know, nothing or some small portion of the bill." So really the unevenness of the coverage affects how much different people are going to pay depending on what type of insurance they have, if they are under medicare, or if they are uninsured.