Sameer Aryal, an intern at A-STAR, Singapore, who obtained his Undergraduate degree from a college in Massachusetts, shrugs the ‘Insurance’ question off and states: “A lot of people in the U.S do not want to be insured.
There is no place in the U.S laws for imposition of any kind on its people. The Obama government is doing everything in its power to ensure that people understand the importance of insurance, but whether it will reach them, cannot be answered right away.” After having understood some of the factors of the current healthcare crisis in the U.S, it’s time to look at the measures that have been taken towards correcting them.
Over the years, there have been many measures that were proposed to primarily reduce healthcare costs in America. These include increased funding for research that promises the discovery of a technique or a drug to diagnose or treat a serious/ chronic condition, patient centric medical delivery systems and increased use of health IT among others. The most primary reason supporting the concern within the healthcare arena is that more money is spent on treatment of chronic illnesses and diseases than on their prevention.
THE SINGLE PATIENT DEAL
The most effective and obvious solution to increase the quality of healthcare would be to ensure that treatments are directed towards specific groups of patients; for example patients who come from a low-income background, people with serious illnesses, those with mental health disorders who need special care and the like. This being said, it has to also be kept in mind, that coordinated target strategies would work a long way towards increase in quality and care rather than specific interventions. Today, research shows that several care coordination programs go a long way towards cost reduction and quality enhancement. An example of the same is the North Carolina Medicaid-led effort. Nevertheless, future directions of these programs or rather interventions would be to compare the costs spent and the savings garnered as a result annually. The single-payer healthcare system which was first implemented in the city of Vermont and which is now slowly finding its way into other cities, perceives healthcare as a human right that must be made available at any circumstance.
THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT
The Affordable Care Act, introduced under the presidency of Barack Obama aims at the procreation of a nationwide insurance coverage system. Further, the act promotes the creation of insurance exchanges ensuring that no citizen who would want to buy individual policies would be denied of the same because of pre-existing conditions and the sort. Further, in an attempt to reduce the soaring costs towards Medicare, the law states that government reimbursements shall be provided only for those treatments that are proven effective and that these reimbursements shall be made for a complete network of procedures involved for the treatment. However, at the end of the day, several Conservatives viewed this policy as nothing but a mere compulsion imposed on the people. It is often suggested by experts that a therapeutic consultation program would work best because it ensures that patients with serious illnesses are adequately monitored and also that they take their medications properly, eliminating the need for advanced procedures. Next in line, is the implementation of electronic health records (EHR) that provides complete information about a patient’s health alongside monitory safety and progress in their condition? Further, services like Preferred Drug List Management introduce patients to the most efficient and inexpensive drugs available in the market thereby adhering to their principles of healthcare alongside doing their bit to refrain costs.
Over the past many years, there’s a strong focus on consolidation, which is giving way to a lot of mergers with respects to hospitals and healthcare practices. The most common one of these is the merger aimed at prevention of duplication of services by hospitals. An important point to note is that these mergers not only lower prices, but also promote customer savings. A frequently encountered suggestion among leading researchers on the subject is that government reimbursements ought to be directed towards quality and not towards quantity. Nevertheless, whether this would be practical in a world where invasive procedures require the patient to have taken dozens of tests prior to the actual examination, is left to be seen.
HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Health information technology practices offer a great way to improve healthcare quality; however, its diffusion into the entire healthcare sector in the U.S is a far cry. Further as with any novel technology, HIT has its own share of barriers like availability, warranty, obsolescence, compatibility and the like. The Congressional Budget Office has noted that the impact of HIT’s on Healthcare would not be made clear without due complementation from healthcare system integration.
To sum it all, a lot of reforms and suggestions have been made/ hypothesized, but the measures are futile to solve the impending problems hosted by the entire health eco system. However, one has to note everything ultimately falls upon individual citizens. Like they say, where there is a will, there is a way.
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