Healthcare Policy Issues and Implications

¶ … Healthcare Policy Issues and Implications The Impact of Healthcare Financial Policy Reform The current precarious and unsustainable economic state of the American healthcare system is substantially attributable to the fact that for-profit health insurance companies dominate the industry (Kennedy, 2006). In that respect, it is incredibly ironic so many individuals (particularly in public office) blame the public programs (i.e. Medicare and Medicaid) for being "bankrupt" when they manage to administrate healthcare for approximately one-tenth the cost extracted (as profit) by the private healthcare industry.

While administration of those public programs costs only approximately two or three percent of their total revenue, the private health insurance industry extracts more than thirty percent of the $2.2 trillion spent annually on healthcare in the United States (Kennedy, 2006). Therefore, the most obvious approach to reducing the runaway cost of American healthcare would be to eliminate (or strictly limit the maximum profits of) the private health insurance industry. Instead, Washington healthcare lobbyists essentially own so many congressmen that it has been impossible to achieve meaningful industry reforms in that regard.

The other principle change that would greatly improve the quality of American healthcare, reduce its cost, and impact my nursing practice the most would be a shift from the ineffective and highly wasteful fee-for-service-based healthcare compensation scheme for a results-based compensation scheme such as that used in Britain (Kennedy, 2006; Reid 2009).

In addition to providing a meaningful incentive to healthcare providers to focus on results, it has also proven to be a highly effective means of reducing costs by similarly disincentivizing duplication of services and other types of economic waste in healthcare services. More specifically, a results-based compensation approach increases the efficiency of physicians because it promotes a wellness-based attitude instead of a specialty-based focus that can substantially ignore overall wellness concerns.

It also helps eliminate wasteful duplication (especially in diagnostic testing) by holding prescribing providers responsible for unnecessary duplication in testing instead of merely passing along the considerable costs associated with them onto third-party payers and public resources under government reimbursement programs. In essence, it incentivizes both wellness and economic responsibility (Kennedy, 2006; Reid 2009).

Healthcare Information Technology in Relation to Cost and Quality Control In my clinical experience, modern healthcare information technology has impacted my practice beneficially in two principal ways: (1) by helping to eliminate provider errors in medication administration, and (2) by providing quantitative data to help identify weaknesses in healthcare delivery. The use of computerized medication logging has frequently flagged errors in medication administration that, in all likelihood, would not have been prevented without the computer system.

Typical examples in my experience have included instances of overmedication, incorrect selection of medications, and contraindicated combinations of medications that had escaped the attention of prescribing providers and nurses responsible for actual medication administration. With respect to the use of medical information systems to improve the quality of care, I.