HEALTH CARE TRENDS

Health Care Trends

Abstract

The paper discuss about the current health trends, thus, health care is a basic human need critical to human beings' ability to lead a productive life, particularly in the modern world and in the context of a global economy. When health care is treated as a social good and this treatment prevails against countervailing forces, the financial responsibility falls on a collectively, typically the nation-state. The research also explores that there is a lack of the healthcare services in the rural areas in United States, and it is suggested to the government to research and design effective policies to counter this issue.

Health Care Trends

Introduction

Health care is a basic human need. While arguably health depends on many factors other than the availability of health care such as the quality of nutrition, of housing, or of the environment, a basic amount of health care is critical to maintaining, recovering, or developing health to its full potential. This is particularly true in the modern world, where public health and health care developments have substantially improved longevity and quality of life.

Discussion and Analysis

The prospect of health reform in the United States is a daily topic in the media, part news, and part conjecture. While the outcome of the current debate about moving closer to universal coverage is unknown, we do know we've been down this road before, many times.

The United States has the most technologically intensive medical practice in the world. It also spends more than any other nation on medical care, but health outcomes in the United States are inferior to those in most other developed nations.

Health Care Systems: Goals, Financing, Fairness, and Access

Fairness so defined in turn depends on whether health care is made contingent on medical need treated as a social good and a social right held by all individuals against the collective they are members of as opposed to ability to pay treated as a market good that each individual or individual family must provide for themselves. Thus, financial arrangements also reveal deep-seated values concerning health care. Most nation-states, the unit of analysis of provision of health care that this entry assumes, lie within a continuum of treating health care as a social good and right at one extreme and as a market good and individual responsibility at the other.

Health Care Cost Trends Declining

The annual health care cost survey conducted by Mercer, which solicits data from employers, found a similar downward direction in both health benefit costs and the underlying trend. The 5.4 percent cost increase projected for 2012 is the lowest increase the survey has projected since 1997. Employers noted that, without raising deductibles, moving employees into lower-cost health plans, or making other cost-shifting moves, the average increase would be 7.1 percent. This larger increase represents the underlying cost trend, which had been running at about 9 percent for several years, according to Mercer's data.

The 2011 Towers Watson Health Care Trend Survey provides a projected per-employee cost for medical and pharmacy ...