The Four Phases Of The Healthcare Industry

Life Cycle

Every industry has a life cycle with four phases; there is an early phase, innovation phase, maturity phase and decline phase. The healthcare sector is in the maturity phase. In the maturity phase, companies settle on their key product and economies of scale are achieved. Additionally in this phase, smaller companies are forced out of the market or are acquired and the barriers to enter the market become very high. The companies that are left in this market no longer focus on the company growth; instead they focus on market share and cash flow in this phase.

Competitive Landscape

Demand for health care services is driven by demographics, advances in medical care and technology. However, the healthcare industry is very special

The graph below is the price chart for three months and you can see that there is a noticeable difference right around the time that 2014 starts between the healthcare index and the S&P 500. We believe that this is because the Affordable Care Act had officially begun at that moment. So far 3 million people have signed up for private insurance through the exchanges offered, while another 9 million more have gained insurance through Medicaid or through their parent’s insurance plans. Thousands more have signed up through the insurers themselves. The graph below shows the price chart for six months in which the healthcare ETF and the S&P 500 have very similar movements up until the beginning of 2014 because of what was mentioned previously. You can see that there was a late spike in October. This is likely because of the original problems the government had with the site healthcare.gov, which was originally supposed to go online by October 1st, 2013. Once the bugs were all figured out the index increased due to the increase in new customers that could now get their healthcare off of the new website. Also some firms were still feeling some of the costs of the new bill and were unable to put as much as they’re used to into R&D. Also below is the price chart for one year where the healthcare ETF and the S&P 500 start in very similar

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