Assignment #6

The article outlines the current situation regarding healthcare and talks about how it has developed over the past few years and what is going to happen to it over the next few years. These statistics say that the amount of money spent on healthcare is increasing. There are different types of healthcare and both public healthcare, which includes Medicare and Medicaid, and private healthcare have increased and are continuing to increase. Public healthcare has increased more and is expected to increase more due to the increasing enrollment in Medicare and Medicaid. The increase in enrollment is due to the again of the baby boomer generation.

The increase in healthcare spending can either mean that people are actually getting sick more often and they need more healthcare or it can mean that healthcare is becoming more expensive because healthcare providers are boosting their prices due to the recession and many other less significant reasons. One of the obvious reasons is that there are more people and therefore more money needs to be spent on healthcare to cover the increasing population. These numbers aren’t necessarily bad because it could only be that the population is growing and nothing more, but population growth is unfortunately only a smaller factor in the increase in spending. The increase in public healthcare is clearly partly due to the increase of people, but the article does not state as to what the reasons for the increase in private healthcare are. My guess is that the increase is due to the increase in prices of healthcare with other factors such as population growth. The system is clearly subject to change and is influenced by the economy, but there are many implications that it will continue to grow as it has even through the recession.

If I could change one thing it would be that the healthcare system be more focused on public health related issues such as prevention of sickness instead of treatment of sickness. With this shift we could spend less money and have a much larger impact. The prevention method is much more effective than the treatment method because it prevents people from ever getting sick at a much lower cost than if they were to get sick and use much more money on treatment. For example the prevention of obesity alone would have the most enormous impact on healthcare that this country has ever seen. If obesity is eliminated then the treatment money of all the problems that obesity causes is nonexistent. This among other large scale changes would have the largest impact on the healthcare system and decrease spending drastically. One of the articles we read earlier this year listed the top ten most important public health improvements in the past century and in my opinion those had more of an impact on the healthcare system than changing any one thing in the healthcare system could ever have. The integration of public health into the healthcare system should be made the number one priority for the changing of the healthcare system instead of the newly proposed global healthcare.