Question

What factors have contributed to today’s high costs of health care and health insurance?

Using these questions and other details easily found in the textbook, participate with your response using at least 150 words.

Answer 1

reasons for high cost of healthcare and health insurance in US.

The overall healthcare expenditure of the US has increased significantly in the past several decade. According to some research the healthcare expenditure has increased over a trillion dollar since 1965. Few reasons for these increase are

Aging and population growth: population growth and populaton aging are one of the main reason for this significant increase. As the population growns the expenditure on healthcare icnreases. As the population increases the healthcare also starts getting expensive, as the life expectency increases and people get older. 50% of the increase in healthcare spending comes from increased costs for services, especially inpatient hospital care. population growth and population aging contribute around 20% and 10% respectively.

sharp rise in diabetes and other cronical illness: illnesses like diabetes have increased significantly with time. According to studies diabetes alone has has led to an increase in spending over the study period. The increased cost of diabetes medications alone was responsible for $44.4 billion of the $64.4 billion increase in costs to treat that disease. After diabetes the other illnesses include back and neck pain, blood pressure issues, high cholesterol and depression.

Increase in health insurance premium: as the healthcare cost increases so does the health insurance premiums. The annual increase in healthcare premium alone in 2018 has increased by almost 5%. The lifestyle changes are also to be blamed for this increase. The government programmes in US have increased the overall demand for healthcare which inturn increase the prices. As the cronic deseases increase the cost of medicare also increases significantly. There is a sharp rise in deseases related to heart and diabetes.

Significant increase in ambulatory costs: ambulatory costs also include outpatient hospital services and emergency room care. according to studies the annual cost of outpatient increased from almost 380 billion dollar to 700 billion dollar. The cost of emergency departments has increased by almost 6% to 7 % over the same period of time.