Discussion Questions: Healthcare Finances and improvement
Name
Department, Institution
Course Code and Title
August 9, 2024
Discussion Question
Based on your knowledge of social determinants of population health, identify the pros and cons of our current healthcare finance and delivery system. Using the OECD indicators, compare healthcare expenditures and outcomes between the US and other OECD countries.
The US healthcare delivery system boasts of offering quality healthcare to patients, particularly those who can afford premium insurance coverage. The quality of care is driven by advancements in telemedicine that have made healthcare more accessible at any time via virtual platforms (Mason et al., 2020). Innovations such as home-based care, accountable care organizations, and high-level patient engagement through health information technology give patients and families greater control over the care they receive (Mason et al., 2020). Policies and laws that mandate comparative effectiveness research and impose Medicare payments restrictions in the event of medication errors also increase the quality of care delivered (Mason et al., 2020). The US healthcare delivery system is also advantageous in terms of transparency, which is evident in policies that require hospitals to make public hospital-specific information that patients could use as a measure of compliance and
A third key advantage of the US healthcare system is the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care, which sources have shown to be more effective in promoting positive health outcomes and illness prevention (Leao et al.,2023).
On the flip side, the US healthcare finance and delivery system has its share of disadvantages. First, the cost of healthcare is high because the system still largely depends on the fee-for-service reimbursement model (Shrank et al., 2021). Underinsured and uninsured individuals are thus forced to pay extremely high out-of-pocket costs for healthcare, which further worsens disparities (Mason et al., 2020). Healthcare access remains a challenge in the US healthcare system as a large proportion of the population...
…US reports a rate of 268, which is higher than the OECD average of 225 (OECD, 2019). An equally high rate of 371 is reported for congestive heart failure patients, against the OECD average of 233 (OECD, 2019). On the measure of diabetes-related
hospital admissions, the US reports a rate of 170, relative to the OECD average of 129 (OECD, 2019). On mortality related to ischemic
stroke, the US reports a rate of 4.2 per 100 adult admissions, which is lower than the OECD average of 7.7 (OECD, 2019). Similarly, in regard to breast
cancer survival rates among adults, the US reports the highest survival rate of 98.7 percent for cancer in early stages, and 40 percent for late-stage cancer, as compared to the OECD average of 97.4 and 38 percent respectively (OECD, 2019). This indicates that the US performs better than other OECD countries in outcomes related to breast cancer and stroke, while it performs…
