American Healthcare

Healthcare Spending Growth Rate is Slowing Down in the US

Though expenditure previously increased at a high yearly rate, the growth in healthcare spending has slowed down to a great extent in the past decade. This is a new report revealed by The Lancet. More than any country in the world, the US expends more on healthcare per capita. This report may come as surprising news since a great deal of reforms have been put into place recently to stretch healthcare coverage across the nation which led to the reduction of the number of people with no medical insurance. In a comparison made by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about the spending and policies of the US along with five other high-spending countries, they found out that America’s spending growth rate dropped to 1% in the last 10 years which is almost the same as the average growth rate in other countries.

According to Luca Lorenzoni, author of the study, the disparity in healthcare spending between the US and the other countries with the same level of income could be due to health sector prices for hospital care and prescription medicines, among others, that are comparatively higher in the US. The gains made in the reduction of healthcare spending can be caused by the price movement, for example, the increased utilization of affordable drugs and the cutback on growth in physician reimbursement rates, the authors concluded.

The OECD is an international group whose aim is to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.” According to them, further economic recovery could bring unfavorable effect on the slowing down of health care spending. The progress found in the study is no reason to be confident in this area. They suggest measures including price controls on Medicare and Medicaid should be considered to avoid potential increases in costs caused by an improving economy.

The American Healthcare Problem

Two-thirds of the people in America are happy with “the way the new healthcare program is working for them,” a June Gallup study discovered. That measure has stayed generally consistent since the research firm first began tracking healthcare fulfillment in the middle of March in order to evaluate how the changes brought on by the Affordable Care Act were affecting people in America. “Americans’ advanced level of fulfillment with how the medical care program is treating them indicates that medical care is not in a problem for most people in America,” the report said. “At the same time, that 30% of the adult population, more than 70 million people, [who are] not satisfied with the medical care program emphasizes the need for improvement.”

While it helped that Affordable Care Act enrollments topped the Obama administration’s maximum estimate of 7 million, that figure is not the most important measure of the reform’s achievements. If those exchange policies are considered to be affordable and the protection assessed to be good, then the future achievements of the Affordable Care Act will be more assured. For the Obama-care story to be one of growing achievements, the experiences of those people in America who benefit from the changes to the insurance program, including low and middle-income earners qualifying for financial assistance, and those with preexisting conditions who cannot be turned away by insurance providers, it will have to over-shadow the pressure the change may place on those who find their rates too expensive, want to visit doctors out of their network and consider their insurance deductibles too great.

When analyzing how the Affordable Care Act has changed the American public’s understanding of its healthcare program, health insurance status is the most significant forecaster of fulfillment. The biggest rate of fulfillment, 77%, is found among Americans with military or veteran health coverage. Medical health insurance or State health programs recipients follow, with 76%, while 70% of Americans with partnership or employer-sponsored plans and 66% of self-insured Americans expressed satisfaction. By comparison, those Americans without insurance were more disappointed with the medical care program. Only 36% of those participants said they were content and 60% said they were disappointed.

Healthcare Problems

Charles Krauthammer provided us all advice when he recommended that we should neglect what President Obama says and focus on what he does. The reality is that very little that Obama peddled to America when he was attempting to gain support for the Affordable Healthcare Act was true. What is going to happen to many People in America in the next months and years is what individuals should be focused on. We might want to consider some of the following, because it may affect us all, one way or the other.

As many as one-half of all American doctors may refuse to join the healthcare transactions. Without doctors, it will be a very hard to make the transactions work and guarantees long waits to see a doctor.

The White House and surrogates say a few individuals will lose their healthcare coverage. The estimate of a 5% cancellation rate would signify about 16 million individuals, or about one-half the number of the uninsured that was originally used to rationalize this problem. Each cancellation provides with it a tale and for some, a complete loss of insurance plan and lack of ability to get treatment. And perhaps as many as a third of the population could be affected once the employer mandates kick in.

The government gets to decide on the details of healthcare coverage each resident will be needed to buy. An older woman may be needed to buy pre-natal coverage; a younger man may be needed to buy coverage for geriatric care. The Affordable Care Act does not differentiate between the needs of the younger and the old, or the sex of the policy-holder, or the needs and wishes of the individual. It is an all-encompassing, like it program, because there is no leaving it.

In order for the program to work, younger, healthy individuals must buy the government required insurance policy. Since most adolescents have no medical problems and the penalty enforced is much less expensive than buying the actual policy, many will no doubt opt to pay the penalty. The fact that previous medical conditions cannot remove one from buying insurance plan makes the choice to pay the penalty and wait until the need for healthcare insurance coverage occurs, a no-brainer.

Global Healthcare Conference

Healthcare management from the private market and government departments will discuss improvement of global efforts to implement GS1 Standards that improve individual safety, provide chain security and efficiency during the International GS1 Healthcare Conference going on in San Francisco, Oct 1-3, 2013, at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District. Speakers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), California Board of Pharmacy, McKesson, Johnson & Johnson, Mercy, Pfizer and Premier will discuss best methods for applying GS1 Standards in healthcare.

More than 250 members from medical centers, producers, providers, market companies, government and regulating companies from 25 countries are expected to attend the conference. The three-day conference, designed “GS1 Standards in Action,” is organized by GS1 Healthcare US, an industry standards team targeted on driving the execution of GS1 Standards in the United States. “With individual safety at stake, market and government authorities globally are in lock-step to create techniques that will enable healthcare members to take better charge of the product information that flows throughout the supply chain, both locally and worldwide,” said Eileen Pheney, vice chairman of healthcare, GS1 US. “The conference offers global healthcare supply chain professionals understanding about standards execution techniques and improvement as well as market and regulating improvements in automatic recognition, traceability and information synchronization.”

Speakers represent multiple facets of the international healthcare supply chain, hailing from government departments, regulating bodies, medical industry companies, U.S. team purchasing companies, medical centers, producers, providers and retailers. Features include:

An opening plenary period targeted on unique device identification (UDI) with speakers from the U.S. FDA, the Japanese people Ministry for Health Welfare and Labor and others.
A period targeted on medical center execution of GS1 Standards, with demonstrations by providers such as Whim (U.S.) and Hospital Aleman (Argentina).
Presentations by international companies and regulating companies, such as the World Customs Organization and California Board of Pharmacy.
Perspectives from providers, such as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and McKesson.
Closing keynote about bedside scanning by Mark Neuenschwander, an expert in drug providing automated and bar code point-of-care systems.

Transformation of Healthcare

Why are we changing healthcare? Why do we feel forced to act with such emergency and in such wide reformative strokes? Did we just awaken one morning shaken to our very core by the scale of having to complete the same health background form several times? Are we driven by hopelessness by the thought of an elderly homeless person having to suffer several fights of disease demanding frequent hospitalizations? Is our battle-forged feeling to human rights egregiously upset by the understanding that some People in America live a few months less than people living on the French Riviera? Or is it perhaps the American Dream, having satisfied itself in all other factors of our lives, that is now growing to the next frontier of toning down the healthcare system to independently and pleasantly serve our pursuit for everlasting happiness? Or maybe it has something to do with cold hard cash.

Healthcare, we are informed, is way too expensive. We are also informed that this is really our mistake because it is our job as customers to police markets, and wellness care is a business. The blame can be traced back in 1965 when we permitted government and consequently, third party payers to place themselves into a well-functioning industry, which treated us from the need to exercise stewardship of our limited sources and caused us to practice careless excessive intake of wellness care sources motivated by opportunistic avarice of medical companies. The obvious solution is that we continue our responsibilities as customers and definitely practice shopping for wellness care on our own penny and at the same time, our supporting benefactors will try to rebuild the wild array of multi-colored and ineffective suppliers into a lean wellness care machine better suited for present day mass consumption.

Mass consumption needs huge manufacturing, which in turn needs proper department of machines and networked software applications. Mass manufacturing improves the value and comfort of solutions for customers. Pay attention to the language. We are referring to value, as in “how much car for the dollar”, not about absolute great quality. A higher enough value feature allows cheap, low great quality products and solutions to be provided as great value good deals for smart customers. The term comfort is a lot simpler to parse, since it is really an inverse measure of calories consumed for the purpose of acquiring a particular service. You can buy anything today with some taps on your iPad, while sitting on the bathroom, enjoying the guidance of thousands of people in the same shoes as you. Nothing should prevent a present day customer from healthcare guidance from the same area.

In a meeting during 2009 by the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Day said, in justifying the growth of private treatment centers or clinics, “What we have in Canada is access to a government, state-mandated wait list. You cannot force a resident in a free and democratic community to simply wait for medical care, and outlaw their ability to extricate themselves from a waiting list.” The Canada experience provides an opportunity to predict the future of healthcare distribution in the United States.

Over the past 20-30 years, the practice of medicine and healthcare has been gradually morphing into a government-run business, often with private health insurance coverage organizations working as the intermediaries. Medical health insurance price controls provide layouts for private insurance coverage compensation preparations. Handled care, motivated and developed by government regulation, needs suppliers to obtain permission from anonymous bureaucrats in order to provide many services they consider necessary for their sufferers. Recommendations and methods, drawn up by committees and sections serving government authorities, are enforced upon suppliers, demanding them to practice according to one-size-fits-all designs or face financial or even legal penalties.

While not the simple Canadian style single-payer program, the U.S. program, especially with the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, gets us to the same place, only in a more Byzantine fashion. True, there are several payers, but the plan suppliers, as a result of the ACA, have become nothing more than openly controlled resources. The guidelines they will be permitted to offer sufferers are all designed and pre-specified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The provider payment conditions, as well as the coding program, as has been the practice for years, will be placed to Medicare insurance compensation plans. We are seeing more and more physicians retire or slow down their practices in reaction to the modifying practice atmosphere. Many are promoting their practices to healthcare centers and becoming shift-working healthcare center workers. Still, others are losing out of all insurance coverage plans, even Medicare coverage in some instances and embarking on cash-only “concierge” healthcare methods.