Week 10 – The Final Check-Up
Hello Everyone! This week, I am submitting my AP Research study for CollegeBoard review, and I’ll receive my results in May. For my concluding statement, I will go over my conclusion and possible policy recommendations.
In this project, I investigated the practices of healthcare corporations that denied patients life-saving diagnostics. Because insurance companies are incentivized by monetary benefits, I found that they often utilize confusing billing procedures to circumvent ACA-protected preventative care coverage and obstruct a patient’s access to care with excessive costs. These financial barriers deterred patients from seeking treatment for dangerous symptoms.
While patient access to diagnostics in the United States is limited in scope, this issue is a manifestation of a larger crisis in the American health industry — the conflict between the health needs of patients and financial motivations of insurance companies. The Commonwealth Fund’s 2017 comparative analysis of eleven first-world countries revealed that the American healthcare system is ranked near last for its high costs that have decreased accessibility and worsened health outcomes for patients.
The solution to this crucial issue of inflated insurance costs could be eliminating the middlemen and removing insurance companies from the healthcare equation. Instead, employers should be able to directly contract healthcare providers so that a seamless network between doctors and patients can exist. Without the interference of insurance companies, healthcare prices would rapidly decrease, and patients would be have an easier access to healthcare.
The removal of an entire industry might initially seem infeasible if not for the numerous companies that have already begun the shift towards the elimination of insurance companies. Eleven percent of large companies, including General Motors and Boeing, plan to directly contract healthcare providers by 2019 to decrease costs from rising insurance premiums. Over the next few years, healthcare reform needs to be designed to undermine the middlemen of insurance companies and incentivize direct contracting with healthcare providers. Through this progressive healthcare policy, American patients will finally have an unfettered access to diagnostics and other vital health services.
I hope my blog was an interesting read! Please contact me at akashshan2019@gmail.com with any questions.
The disappearance of the middle men is not very likely, at least right away, but your implications are profound and do pose questions for how this issue should be addressed in the future. I have a feeling that it will. Congratulations on your project, and wrapping the AP Capstone program.