Current and Future Economic Issues Impacting Healthcare Sector Coursework

Current and Future Economic Issues Impacting Healthcare Sector - Coursework Example This paper thoroughly analyzes these five factors that are affecting the demand and supply, as well as the costs, of health care services in the United States. It also suggests specific strategies that relevant entities may use to address these issues from an economic perspective. Physician sovereignty implies that health care professionals, such as doctors, largely influence or regulate the demand for health care. People believe that they require the checkups, medicines, and therapies that the physician advises. Health care demands professional knowledge or expertise. People depend on the doctor. The physician could consider cost, but they are obviously minor (Culyer et al., 2011). Decisions are made based on established clinical knowledge and practice and the guarantee of appropriate, correct health care. The usual thriftiness of a consumer who weighs prices against one another thoroughly and makes budgets is nonexistent in health care. Although this is not essentially negative, it does further result in a greater demand for, and thus increasing costs of, medical care. Moreover, within conventional ‘fee-for-service insurance’, the higher the number of services that are suggested the greater the income the physician or hospital gets (Aizer, 2007 , 405). This situation could result in unnecessary services with gains that are not equal or more than their costs. In fact, physicians may be inclined to over-service, over-test, and overprescribe, particularly if this excessive medical care lessens the possibility of an expensive medical malpractice case (Hicks, 2014). The over-demand produced by third-party payments is a perfect illustration of how consumer decision-making and behavior can be influenced by financial incentives. Consumers are simply acting in response reasonably to the incentive of a lowered price, and the unused or misused medical care is an indication of consumer preference. The result may not be socially desired, yet the consumer remains

Write a report on the article Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Write a report on the article - Essay Example To provide a context for the case described in the article, there has been an exponential growth in the number of e-learning programs offered by universities around the world. Hence, it becomes imperative to erect suitable measures to prevent these systems from going down. There is a need to ensure that e-learning systems that are the backbone of many of the courses offered by these universities are robust and can withstand the onslaught of cyber warriors who delight in hacking into these systems and bringing them down. The case described in the article is about how the e-learning system that went down was a result of poor maintenance and inadequate measures taken by the administrators responsible for maintaining the system. As the authors point out, there were several lapses in the way in which the system was maintained and run by the IT department of KU. Some of them include, not taking backups regularly, improper use of the C drive and no structured effort to maintain user accounts and delete them after the students have left the university. These and other errors led to the system crashing and threatening the conduct of the e-learning course in the university. What is galling is the fact that there was a lackadaisical approach to the whole issue of maintaining the system from failure. This is something that the management of KU ought to take seriously and ensure that such haphazard methods of maintaining the system are avoided. This case holds lots of lessons for the system administrators of all kinds of IT systems and in particular, those of the e-learning modules that are very popular in the education sector. The fact that downtime in a system threatens the conduct of the entire course and leaves the fate of the students in the balance should be a wakeup call to all those who are in-charge of maintaining the system. The article is an important