Currently, the healthcare situation in the United States is worse than at the beginning of the last decade, and there are no signs that it will be better anytime soon because no affirmative action has been taken to manage the crisis. Trump’s government is going slow on this issue, making the livelihood of most of the United States’ citizens tough due to the high cost of accessing quality healthcare. The healthcare system of the U.S. is distinct not only across all the industrialized countries but also all over the world; for instance, the healthcare system embraces a hybrid system whereby the national health insurance service can be either single-payer or multi-payer universal health insurance fund. The United States lacks universal healthcare coverage despite its level of GDP. However, recent legislation was enacted to ensure that every citizen accessed healthcare services. According to the OECD, the U.S. spends $9,200 per person or 18% of its GDP on healthcare (Papanicolas, Woskie & Jha, 2018) . These figures suggest that the United States is the first country in the world in terms of healthcare spending. Although the government has governmental healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, a significant percentage of U.S. citizens still lack healthcare services.
In 2019, the United States government used $4.1 trillion on healthcare expenses, which is twice the money spent on healthcare in other developed countries (Papanicolas et al. , 2018) . Medical analysts argue that the prevalence of state-of-art medical technologies and drugs in the region generate high demand, thus increasing the spending on healthcare. Due to this, most of the households in the U.S. encounter huge healthcare financial burdens due to low wages, out-of-pocket expenses, and high premiums and taxes (Marchildon, Cafaro & Brown, 2018) . Moreover, multiple other factors affect the healthcare sector leading to increased healthcare costs. For instance, the administrative costs of running the healthcare system in the U.S. are so high that they account for a quarter of the total health care expenditure. According to Marchildon et al . (2018), t he increase in administrative expenses is due to the many billing specialists required in the hospitals to meet the varying requirements of multiple insurers unlike in Canada which use a single-payer system rather than numerous insurers.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Besides, Congress initiated the Medicare Part D to deny the negotiation of drug prices, whereas, in multiple nations, they are negotiated by their governments. Only Medicaid and Veteran’s administration are allowed to settle for drug prices. In turn, low-income citizens are subjected to higher drug costs which raise healthcare costs. In the same context, defensive medicine is another trigger of high healthcare cost since most healthcare providers fear being sued by their patients or the firms which fight for patient’s rights. Statistics affirms that $700 billion is spent annually on defensive medicine (Obama, 2016) . In his case, medics run multiple diagnosis tests on individuals to be certain on what could be causing illness yet the causes could be found by only running a few diagnoses. Additionally, wages and staffing in the healthcare centers escalate healthcare costs since the physicians demand high reimbursements and wages. For instance, in 2013, Congress in cohesion with the National Commission on Physician Payment Reform agreed to raise the pay of physicians to reduce the high charges demanded by health specialists although the implementation failed (Obama, 2016) .
Consequently, high healthcare costs are causing adverse effects on all the demographics of the United States. The trend of lower wages among employees in every field is increasing in the U.S. since employers are bearing high health insurance costs (Emanuel, 2018) . Therefore, to increase productivity in their firms, they have to halt wages and salary increases. Emanuel (2018) agrees that America is experiencing a degradation of medical care due to misdiagnoses and an increase in uninsured family members. The misdiagnoses are a result of a high patient to nurse’s ratio whereby few nurses are obligated to serve many patients. Such a scenario leads to hospital-caused infections among patients, thus decrease in medical security. The rapid increase in uninsured family members is due to employees cutting down healthcare family coverage because of its high cost (Emanuel, 2018) . Besides, the elderly and disabled individuals will suffer from unaffordable expenses of nursing homes, the local government taxes and fees will rise, and social insecurity and Medicare cuts will continue increasing as a result of high healthcare costs.
In conclusion, just like any other sector, healthcare markets have competition too. Healthy competition is necessary because it contains consumer benefits such as decreased healthcare costs and improved quality in healthcare dispensation. However, the absence of a transparent healthcare competition leads to the dissatisfaction of the public because they have limited options to control the market place. Due to this, the Federal Trade Commission ensures healthcare providers engage in competitive conducts which are harmless to the consumers. The Division of Economic and Healthy Policy research asserts that over the past decade, health insurance firms have been in the constant competition by introducing cheaper insurance programs to diversify their market to all social classes. Similarly, patients and healthcare consumers require more information and power to have a significant say in demanding the reduction of healthcare costs in the U.S. Also, competition in the healthcare market ought to increase, Medicare should negotiate drug costs for consumers of healthcare, medics should reduce the number of medical tests done for patients’ diagnosis procedures, and healthcare price transparency should be well defined to make a significant change in reducing the healthcare costs across the United States.
References
Emanuel, E. J. (2018). The real cost of the US healthcare system. Jama , 319 (10), 983-985.
Marchildon, G. P., Cafaro, C. S., & Brown, A. (2018). Myths, Misperceptions, and Policy Learning: Comparing Healthcare in the United States and Canada. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , 46 (4), 833-837.
Obama, B. (2016). United States healthcare reform: progress to date and next steps. Jama , 316 (5), 525-532.
Papanicolas, I., Woskie, L. R., & Jha, A. K. (2018). Healthcare spending in the United States and other high-income countries. Jama , 319 (10), 1024-1039.
