Medicare and Medicaid at 50 Years, Research Paper Example

Healthcare stakeholders refers to individuals or groups that might be impacted by or influence an effort.  They can also include individuals or groups that maintain a strong interest in an effort for philosophical, political, or academic purposes even though they and their friends, associates, and families are not directly impacted by it. From a political and policy perspective, stakeholder healthcare concerns directly impact effective healthcare delivery in the United States. One such concern is the notion of universal healthcare and how healthcare reform will impact Medicare and Medicaid services.

Policy makers and healthcare stakeholders have recently revisited and reconsidered a political dialogue regarding the benefits and efficacy Medicare in the wake of President Barack Obama’s universal healthcare program often referred to in the media and in political discourses as “Obamacare”. Such discussions have involved a reexamination and reevaluation of Medicare, a reassessment of its niche in the American healthcare system, and its overall economic impact at the micro and macro levels. One of the main barometers of economic analysis of the healthcare industry is the insulation of healthcare service recipients from the real costs so as to quell the economic incentive in order to balance the costs and benefits.  The RAND Health Insurance Experiment provides a scheme that models how prices directly affect the demand for healthcare services. The main results from that study suggest that raising prices of healthcare by an estimated ten percentage points would diminish the demand for healthcare services by more than two percentage points (Finkelstein, 2014). This argument suggests that price sensitivity can plausibly diminish the amount of medical care and healthcare services consumed by Americans today. This observation furthermore has a vast array of implications for Medicare reform and supports a political, economic, and policy argument in favor of Medicare because the program boosts the economy and can provide universal healthcare to all Americans.

Ultimately, many healthcare experts, stakeholders, and policy makers are concerned about the notion of “Medicare for all” under Obamacare. They contend that Medicare is ineffective at controlling costs, and, within the current economic climate, such wasteful spending is an acute concern, resulting in almost one dollar out of every five spent on healthcare having no value. Such wasteful spending can be harmful to the delivery of healthcare to stakeholders and the American economy overall.  Medicare poses this problem because it is mainly a third-party payer system that insulates patients from having to pay the costs for their healthcare, which itself shields them from having to make informed decisions about what healthcare is necessary.

References

Altman, D. & Frist, W.H. (2015).  Medicare and Medicaid at 50 years: Perspectives of   beneficiaries, health care professionals and institutions, and policy makers. JAMA, 314(4), 384-395.

Finkelstein, A. (2014). Static and dynamic effects of health policy: Evidence from the vaccine industry.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119(2), 527-564.