Article review

Article Review

Introduction

The financing of Point of care system in the United States is part public, part private; part national health insurance through Medicare, Medicaid, and several other government—sponsored programs; part employer sponsored; and increasingly individually purchased through private-pay insurance plans and out-of-pocket payments from consumers. The perfectly competitive model in economics assumes perfect information, but in reality, there are many gaps in our information set. Kenneth Arrow's (1963) article, the cornerstone of health economics, beautifully describes the problem of uncertainty. We cannot know the future, and we face the possibility of loss of income and assets from health problems. The loss of income and assets comes through lost work time and from medical bills. At the same time, most of us would prefer to not face this risk of loss. This feature of our preferences, risk aversion, arises because most people have decreasing marginal utility in wealth or income. That is, the increase in utility from the first dollar of income you receive is higher than the increase in utility from your hundredth dollar and so on. Because of this feature, we dislike losing a dollar more than we like gaining a dollar. In economic terms, the decrease in utility from losing a dollar is bigger than the increase in utility from a dollar.

It's a complex system that, for all the wealth it consumes and creates in the United States, still has left almost 20% of the population with no coverage and many more with far too little coverage. Under the health reform legislation of 2010 (HR 3590, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and HR 4872, The Reconciliation Act), many of the uninsured will receive health care coverage through an expanded Medicaid program or under the requirement that everyone purchase insurance. For those who do not meet the poverty guidelines for the expanded Medicaid coverage, an insurance exchange will be available through which they are expected to be able to find affordable coverage (Soskolne, 2010).

How Much Does Point of Care system cost in the United States?

The first place to start our discussion of health care financial management is to grasp how much the cost of health care is in the United States and what is driving the rapid rate of increase in costs. At the end of 2006, the U.S. tab for health care (hospitals, physicians, pharmaceuticals, nursing home care, and so on) was %2.3 trillion or 16% ...