Incentivization In Healthcare

The US government currently has an annual deficit over 400 billion dollars due to having a higher budget than revenues. Healthcare takes up 25% of the federal budget totaling almost 1 trillion dollars, and is extremely inefficient in its current state. But as Americans pay more, they get less for their health care than residents of other high income countries; of 16 surveyed countries America has the shortest life expectancy for men and women, and the highest rates of mortality for newborns and children under five, as well as the highest rates of death from heart and lung disease coupled with the highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases(Gayle).By incentivizing a healthy lifestyle, creating a more competitive market for health insurances,

To do this the US must have higher Co-Pays: Oeioke are far more careful in using health services when they have to pay for them themselves. Co-pays should be indexed on income as the high the income the higher the co-pay, no one except those unable to pay should be exempt. On Top of high Co-Pays mandated insurance should only include catastrophic health insurance, any non essential insurances are amenities that should be chosen by the patient based on how much they are willing to spend. Catastrophic Health insurance has high deductibles and is mainly for expensive prolonged treatment. Catastrophic insurance costs an average of 2 percent of what US annual insurance premiums cost(Haseltine). Singapore only spends 1.9% of their GDP(Ministry of Health Singapore) while having longer life expectancies, lower child mortality rates., and lower lung, heart and sexualy transmitted desiese rates than the united states who spend 17.5% of their GDP on healthcare(National Health Accounts Historical) . Although adopting higher Co-Pays would cause some patients to pay more for their healthcare, it would greatly benefit the healthy working class because would have to pay less for health care. by adopting these more effective and incentivised ways of providing health care, the us

The US can implement this by having greater price and quality transparency. This has been proven to work when George W. Bush enacted medicare Part D - a competitive market for drugs with government set ground rules, Medicare Part D has cost below all government projections since its inception, and in 2013 was 50% below what the congressional budget office originally estimated.(Emanual). If we could implement similar government regulated open markets for healthcare the cost of healthcare would, studies have also shown when a similar act was enacted for medical equipment, the prices dropped by 42% and studies have not shown and problems.(Emanuel) Although this would cause Health Care industries to make less profit from each sale, it would greatly lower the cost and increase the quality of healthcare for everyone. Significant evidence shows that market competition works to control health care cost like any other industry, and by pushing for an open health care market, health care costs would go down by at least 30% allowing the government and the people to pay less for health