The Iron Triangle: Relationship Between Cost And Quality Of Health Care

““The Iron Triangle" is a term coined to describe the relationship between cost, quality, and access in all sorts of institutions such as policy making, healthcare, and businesses” (Iron Triangle). The Iron triangle concept is to help ensure the proper healthcare is delivered. The three major concepts of the iron triangle reflect on each other. “You can't affect one aspect without affecting the other two aspects” (Iron Triangle). The cost, quality, and access are the key points of the iron triangle. The relationship exists between the cost of health care, people’s ability to get healthcare when needed and the quality of services. “To make health care more affordable would increase access to it, but most likely decrease the quality of care. You might increase the quality of the healthcare, but that will increase costs and limit access to it. You could also increase access to the healthcare, but that will cost money, or result in lower quality care. Being that the relationship is reciprocal it is difficult to have any significant change in cost, quality, or access. The problem with this is that they are in competition with each other” (Iron Triangle).

The main reasons of a rise in cost is because of the hospital services, prescription drugs and physician services. The third party payments, imperfect market, growth in technology, increase in the elderly population, medical model, defensive medicine, wastes and abuse, and practice variation have also increased the cost market. New technology has raised expectation of consumers, which creates more demand. As for the defensive medicine aspect, doctors will provide tests and services that are not medically needed to protect themselves from malpractice lawsuits, increasing costs. Practice patterns differ between regions leading to higher costs. Also, waste and abuse of programs such as Medicaid and