Health Care Cost and Quality Analysis Introduction

Healthcare is significantly costly within the United States. Recent research studies have indicated that there is no correlation between health care cost and quality. For instance, despite the fact that there has been a significant increase in spending in the United States, the per capita spending projections are just about 200 percent higher compared to other developed nations. Regardless being top globally in terms of costs, the U.S is ranked 26th with respect to life expectancy and is also poorly rates on other healthcare quality indicators (Burke and Ryan, 2014). The purpose of this paper is to analyze one public agency and one private agency, delineate their roles and major activities in addressing cost and quality in healthcare, their current and projected initiatives and the implications they have for nursing.

Roles and Major Activities in Addressing Cost and Quality

Different agencies in the United States play different roles in addressing cost and quality in healthcare. The selected public agency is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services whereas the selected private agency is National Coalition on Health Care. National Coalition on Health Care is a partnership and alliance of groups working to accomplish wide-ranging health system reform. The agency has a role of devotion to building a nationwide bipartite agreement in favor of representation and execution of sustainable, universal, and system-wide healthcare...

NCHC’s mission is centered on five codependent principles creating a context for enhancing the health care system of America including cost management, health care coverage for all, enhancement of healthcare quality and safety, evenhanded financing and streamlined administration (NCHC, 2018). On the other hand, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is a state agency contained within the United States Department of Health and Human Services with the role of administering Medicare program and undertakings in tandem with the state governments in order to run and oversee different healthcare programs such as Medicaid and health insurance portability benchmarks (CMS, 2018).
Current and Projected Initiatives

Both of these agencies are linked to prevailing and projected initiatives purposed to improve quality while at the same time controlling costs. One of the key initiatives undertaken by CMS is referred to the Meaningful Measures agenda. Imperatively, this initiative ascertains the topmost significances for quality measurement and improvement. It takes into account solely examining those core problems that are the most pivotal to offering high-quality care and augmenting individual results. Meaningful Measurement Areas are the linkages between CMS Strategic Goals and distinct measures or initiatives that make evident the manner in which high quality results for patients are being attained. They are material quality topics which mirror fundamental…