Recession Produces Some Results Sought by Health Reformers
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has issued a report titled “The Impact of the Economy on Health Care.” It finds that the economy actually is affecting health care in the following ways [link]:
- Because of decreased demand for non-urgent or elective care, increases in health expenditures have likely slowed.
- Because fewer patients are seeking elective services, there is lower utilization.
- Providers are compensating for lost revenue from lower demand and more unpaid patient bills by expanding their working hours. They are compensating for lost investment assets by postponing retirement. This increases the health care workforce.
- Community hospitals have cut staff, cut administrative expenses, reduced services, and put upgrades in clinical services and information technology systems on hold. This reduces waste.
- The shortage of nurses has eased. This lowers costs.
Utilization down, cost curve bent, waste eliminated. What will capitalism think of next?
Linda, economic incentives work.
It will be especially interesting to see how stable surgeons’ fees for cosmetic surgery are during the recession. Purportedly, people cut back on cosmetic procedures and this likely resulted in huge discounts in the price of procedures. Cosmetic surgery and corrective eye surgery are the only areas in medicine that operate like a free market.
The logical conclusion of this illogical premise that this is the result of CAPITALISM is that we should have a full-blown depression to really reduce the spending on health care.
Go back and re-read Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” He addresses the critical importance of a nation’s citizens being well fed and healthy as critical contributors to the wealth of a nation – that is, the capacity to add value in the creation goods and services. He notes that malnourished, unhealthy people may be cheaper in the short run, but unwise in the long run in the nation’s competitiveness.
I can’t believe a thinking person can be so myopic.
the economic recession made a lot of workers jobless. my best friend and me lost our jobs because of job cuts. i hope that our economy would recover soon