Prescription Drug Coverage Perspective

Sociology The United Nations predicts that by 2050, the world's population will exceed 9 billion people. Discuss the consequences of population growth on the world's resources (include environmental and health factors such as food, water, air, access to medicine). Why is the world's population growing so fast? And how is technology contributing to this rapid growth? There are several major reasons for population growth being what it is. As described by an article on the Yale University website, there are three main ones.

Those would be tackling of infectious disease in many countries, improvement in public health overall and improved production and distribution of food. When it comes to food production, just one example of how well food production is done now would be that grain has increased in volume from 631 million tons to about 1.65 billion tones just from 1950 to 1984 alone. This is a factor of 2.6 times. Over the same time period, the world population has only grown 1.9 times.

The frenetic pace of food production as compared to population growth has not slowed down in more recent years. In the last ten years, overall food production has risen by about a fourth (24%) and this has also outpaced population growth over the same time period. When it comes to public health, the improvements in sanitation, the heavy use of vaccines and improved medical care overall have improved conditions for just about everyone (Yale, 1998).

However, the population growing at such a fast pace is going to cause problems that are not already present and there most certainly are problems apparently right now. Indeed, Yale made assertions about these problems nearly a generation ago. There are a lot of people that are having entirely too many kids. Indeed, high fertility is often correlated (or absolutely caused in many cases) with poverty.

This condition is worse in Africa and China, to name two places, but it can be a major issue anywhere when the available money is not enough to feed the mouths that need satiating. There will also eventually be shortages of fuel, water and healthcare (Yale, 1998). Healthcare Economics Discuss the economic implications of prescription drug coverage (including generic drugs) on health care, from an individual standpoint and from the health care system standpoint. The economic implications related to prescription drug coverage are obvious and apparent.

In a country where so many people have varying degrees of chronic conditions (e.g. diabetes, heart disease, HIV / AIDS, etc.) or even temporary major conditions (e.g. pneumonia, influenza, etc.), not having access to cheap and affordable drugs is a major life issue for many. In many to most situations, people are covered by prescription drug coverage due to having health insurance and subsidized/free options exist for those that need it (Healthcare.gov, 2015).

However, there are situations where individuals need drugs that are moderately to very expensive and/or the people involved do not have drug coverage to begin with. Throw in the fact that the latest and greatest drugs are often protected in the form of patent enforcement that thus prevents generics from being developed and sold, this makes the situation even worse for some people.

Again, most people are doing fine but those in poverty and/or those with one or more chronic conditions might have to choose between eating and medicine (News Medical, 2014). At a systemic level, it is much the same story with most people doing good to great while others suffer due to the way the system is constructed.

Indeed, there was the recent story of a prescription drug CEO turned pariah when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, snapped up the rights to a drug and then raised the cost of the pill from about $15 a pill to.