Healthcare Insurance: Justice for All

Thesis Statement

To justify the cost of health care in the United States it?s important to look at the personal income of each individual. The mean average of income for a male individual in the United States is $40,798 and for a female $31,223. The reason this information is important is because most Americans purchase or obtain healthcare through there employer and the quality of that healthcare can be determined based upon the amount of income they can bring into the household.

Factors

There are several factors that have affected the cost of health care coverage over the course of the past two to three decades. One of these factors is the introduction and rapidly increasing enrollment in managed health care insurance plans. Managed care health insurance plans can, in most cases, help to alleviate the rising costs of effective medical coverage.

Another important factor that has affected health care costs is the invention and implementation of new medical technologies. As prominent researchers and economic analysts have discovered, there is a distinct and direct correlation between advancing medical technologies and rising health care costs. Medical innovation has been proven time and again to be an important determinant of health care cost growth. It would appear that managed care health insurance plans, which attempt to lower health care costs, and highly expensive new medical innovations and procedures are at cross purposes, pulling against one another in very different directions.

Market-level comparisons have found the cost growth of health care in markets with greater managed care penetration to be generally slower than that of non-managed care health insurance markets. However, managed care is unlikely to prevent the share of gross domestic product spent on health care from rising unless the cost-increasing nature of new medical technologies changes. Managed care health insurance plans differ greatly from indemnity fee-for-service, or FFS, insurance plans. Since the early 1970's, rapidly growing enrollment in managed care health insurance plans has transformed the health insurance market in the United States. Health insurance providers that operate under the fee-for-service concept grant the consumer much more freedom of choice concerning doctors and treatment programs, thus freeing the consumer of any feelings of discontent with "interfering" insurance companies.

While researching how much Healthcare spending is now compared to a 18 month period, it is astounding how health care spending growth slowed in 2004 to 7.9 percent, mostly due to a slowdown in the growth of drug spending. For the first time in a decade, drug spending slowed to single digits, rising 8.2 percent, or less half the rate measured just five years earlier according in the journal Health Affairs. In 2004, health care spending was $1.9 trillion, or $6,280 per person. This study showed that U.S. spends on health care accounts for 16 percent of the gross domestic product, up from 13.8 percent in 1993 and 9.1 percent in 1980.

Most employees covered by medical care plans were in healthcare plans which required employee contributions, not just for the individual employee, but for ...