Health Care Reform's Possible Implications

Hello, and welcome to this edition of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. Recently the best article I found revolved around health insurance reform. Health insurance reform is on a lot of people's minds lately due to what is perceived a broken insurance system that we currently have in place. It's also been on the forefront of the current presidential campaign, with both candidates spouting off their own ideas for reform. We have two articles, one looking at the possible implications of reform, and one looking at starting reform now.

The first article comes to us from BusinessWeek and is entitled, "The Implications of Health-Care Reform." In this article, author Wendy Diller first looks at statistics that underlie the flaws in our current health insurance system. For example, in 2000, 8.7 million Americans lacked health insurance, while in 2006, that number swelled to 47 million Americans. Statistics also show that the costs of health care are also rising, up to $2.7 trillion in 2007.

There are many proposed solutions to these sorts of issues, but there are some basic themes that run through each of them. The first is wider, broader access to health care for everyone, not just those who are insured. Another is better access to medicine and care of higher value, as well as greater efficiency of the health care system as a whole. Another theme is closer correlation between reimbursement to effectiveness which would help both patients and doctors.

The article goes onto say that there are companies already working on efforts such as these, and they have the most to gain from a large swath of health insurance reforms, even if these niche's are a small part of their overall business. There are, however, other sectors of the health care industry that might suffer repercussions as a result of reforms. One of the problems is lowering the cost of health insurance so that it's accessible to more people in the face of rising health care costs. Companies that support Medicare or Medicaid would likely be hard hit due to reforms that called for such price cuts, as the government is first to see such cuts.

Overall, it's an interesting article about both the upsides and downsides of health insurance reform. It's this authors hope that everyone eventually has access to affordable health insurance and health care, but only time will tell if this becomes a reality.

That concludes this installment of the Weekly Health Insurance News Roundup. I hope you have found it interesting and informative, and may you have a happy and healthy day.