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Health Care Spending

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Healthcare Spending
Ngozi Ofolomah
HCS 440
Bruce Peterson
September 17, 2012

Healthcare Spending

Healthcare spending is a key factor to any country’s economic expansion. It provides many job opportunities for high skilled workers residing in rural areas. Additionally, further advancements in drugs and medical technology lead to the new innovations, products and new areas of marketing. Health spending is essential because it fulfills personal and social needs for medical service that are set in place to better health, increase productivity, and save lives (Squires, 2012). In comparison with the many other sectors of the economy, a significant portion of the health care is publicly funded. When viewing other countries, we notice that they have adopted a universal healthcare system. This means that the systems are financed through taxes. In the United States, there are systems in place such as Medicare and Medicaid (Squires, 2012). Medicare is an insurance program for persons who are either elderly or disable. Medicaid is insurance coverage for families who have low-income. It is public funds that assist people with health care in these two insurance programs. There are also tax policies that promote and provide support to employer-based health insurance and delivery systems such as, Veterans Health Administration. Due to the fact that the public sector has a lot of pull in regards to healthcare, it has become had to make sure that we are gaining value for the time and money spent. From decade to decade we have seen the United States health care spending increase. It was reported in the year 2010 that the U.S. had healthcare expenses that cost $2.6 trillion dollars. This is ten times over the amount that was spent on healthcare in 1980, which was $256 billion dollars (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2012). Shinning some light on the

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