Week 1
From the first e-Activity, determine the most commonly used population and individual measures used in providing healthcare today. Examine the primary impact that these measures exert on the choices that consumers make in order to address their own healthcare needs. Justify your response.
Measuring health is used commonly across populations and individual measures used in providing healthcare today. Tracking health of the population is necessary to trend and control cost. The broad health account requires data on medical care expenditures and on the benefits derived, which are what patients and collectively, society seek to purchase. The output side of the account is quantified in terms represented by the population's health. The U.S. spent more than $2 trillion dollars on health care, or $7,026 per capita, in 2006. This is about twice as much per capita as countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.
Not all of the increases in health spending are necessarily bad. Some health economists note that as countries become wealthier, they choose to spend more on health care. Some analysts, such as David Cutler of Harvard, argue that most of the additional expenditure is a worthy investment which pays dividends in terms of decreased mortality and improved quality of life.
Also, while health expenditures may be burdensome to some, they provide income to others. Hospitals and health care facilities are the economic engines of many communities. Some of the wages and supplier revenue they generate gets returned to state and federal coffers in the form of corporate and individual taxes.
However, health spending has been rising two and half percent a year faster than the gross domestic product over the past four decades. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects health spending will rise to nearly 20 percent of the GDP by