Question

What economic and societal factors affect the demand and pricing of healthcare services in today's health insurance market?

Answer 1

Answer- The health of each individual depends many factors surrounding the person like exercise, healthy eating habits, smoking, drugs etc. All these factors affect how the health of an individual will be. But the most vital factors affecting health of individual are social and economic factors. These favtors in turn affect the overall pricing and the demand of the health care services.

Some societal factors that affect the health of individual are like invome level, education level, family support etc. In simple words it means that an individual with good amount of money and high education level may go for regular health check ups and with good education he or she might know how to take care of self for eg. taking enough nutients daily and eating right and healthy food. But a person with low level of income and lack of knowledge might not consider doing these things. Due to these factors the prices of health care services are affected as more and more people fall sick or are not able to take care of their health the prices of health care services rises. Seeing such rise in prices of medicare facilities people start taking proper care, eat the right food and thus demand falls down.

An example of societal factors affecting health would be as such: A mother who lives in rural areas and works as a daily wage laborer. In their culture people get married very early and eventually have babies at a very young age. This leads to health problems with mother and the new born baby. If there is a culture where people smoke a lot then this causes major breathing problems for people living in that are because people who do not smoke often inhale the smoke coming out of other people’s ciggarettes knowingly or unknowingly.

On the other hand environmental factors also affect the health. People who live in forests, mountains or areas with a lot greenery have less health problems as compared to people living in urban or less green areas. This is due to the purity of air people breathe in and the organic or chemical food they consume. It is often seen that people in urban areas eat more junk food while in rural areas people eat more natural food, which leads to significant difference in health of people living in urban and rural areas.

If we look into the health model chart we would see that a persons health depends upon 30 percent on healthy behaviours like smoking, healthy food etc and 20 percent on clinical services like regural check ups and 40% on societal and economic factors as discussed above and lastly 10 percent on environmental factors.( These figures are taken on a survey conducted for a college project and are subject to change with the course of time)

Some other factors that lead to higher health care services in USA than other countries are as follows:-

• High administrative costs like billing and services etc.

• Bad eating habits and ageing of people leading high treatment of diseases.

• No or less action by government to bring the prices down.

• High income of people ie., per capita income

• Latest technology which beings more costs in treatment of people etc.