Principles of Healthcare Management: Consequences of the Uninsured Problem
Read the case study below and answer the questions that are incorporated within the case study. What is your evaluation of the problem of the uninsured from a stakeholder perspective? Incorporate a minimum of 5 references written within the past five years, to support your responses/justifications.
Case Study: Business Feels the Consequences of the Uninsured Problem:
Not only do healthcare costs reduce our nation's ability to compete in the global marketplace, but also the loss of productivity due to illness or injury is of concern to any business. For the uninsured, time away from work further complicates family financial issues, but also decreases overall productivity of the nation. Median time away from work in 2000 due to illness and injury was 6 days (median for males = 6 days; females = 5 days). A total of 1,664,000 days away from work were reported (those that were reported) in 2000. In 1996, temporary illness or injury resulted in 1,234,000 people between the ages of 20 to 64 years to miss work. Using the median days missing work per person (6 days) and the number of people missing work due to temporary illness or injury (1,234,000) by the percentage of Americans without health insurance (14.6% and removing the 24.7% of the uninsured that did not work), a crude estimate of workdays lost is calculated to be nearly 814,000 days attributed to uninsured working Americans. If those Americans had health insurance, how many days of missed work and productivity could have been avoided? If only 20% of those lost workdays of the uninsured could have been avoided, over 160,000 workdays could have been added to the nation's productivity.
Questions:
- How do you evaluate the problem of the uninsured from a stakeholder perspective? Use the template or model below to summarize your thoughts and discuss this problem with others.
- Describe the issue based on the topic/content area/change in your own words (the uninsured Issue is the case study in the chapter).
- How does this topic/content area/change impact the following major stakeholder groups?
- Explain what is the healthcare industry perspective on this issue over the next 3 years? Look at the topic, individually, from a cost, quality, and access point of view and then summarize the overall industry perspective in four to five sentences below.
Cost: _______________________________________________________________________________
Quality: _____________________________________________________________________________________
Access: _______________________________________________________________________________________
Overall industry perspective (integrate cost, quality, and access perspectives)