Financing Health Care - Essay Example

Decisions that concern policy are associated with various types of ethical and economical challenges. The final decisions are strongly influenced by both ethical and economic implications. The government of the United States has established various measures in order to streamline the national health care system. Medical care should not consider cost while making decisions. People also felt that Provenge drug was too expensive to be included in the Medicares treatment plan (Henderson, 2011). This paper seeks to ascertain how cost and policy issues affect the process of policy decision.

Despite it being unethical for Medicares decision to be affected by cost, it is also uneconomical for the government to end the huge bills allied with cancer medicine. The United States having one of the most expensive healthcare systems, it is important for the government to come up with economic strategies.

This can be completed as long as drugs are provided into Medicares system. By doing this, Americans will be forced to pay higher taxes. Treatment of prostate cancer by use of profane drugs costs more than $90,000 for each patient (Henderson, 2011). This makes it economically costly seeing that the medication only lengthens the patients lifespan by four months. As cited earlier, Medical help should not contemplate costs during formulation and implementation of its strategies.

In addition, it is also wrong for medical help to prioritize particular diseases at the expense of others. One of toughest responsibilities is formulating and harmonizing between economical and ethical views. It is hence significant to widely look at the overall implications of a conclusion before its application. In circumstances where affirmative implications extracted from a policy influence negatively the implications, it is essential that the strategy be implemented even if the ethical and economic applications dominate one another (Kingdon & Thurber, 2010). The ethical implications must not be so immoderate in such a way that they compromise the general positive influences of the strategy. However, if strategy decisions are related with unreasonable economic effects they should not be embraced. Policy makers within the health care scheme must always try to balance between ethical and economic effects of any conclusion. In situations where some stakeholders are adamant that cost issues should be prioritized over ethical issues, such stakeholders support the governments quest to cut the high cost associated with the national health care system. Contrarily some stakeholders are adamant that medical help should uphold the highest moral standards during the decision making process. These viewpoints have enormously added towards the pressure between costs and care. In a situation like this one, the best way for decision-making is affected by the assessment of existing capitals. Despite this method raising more concerns, it is the most concrete approach.

References

Henderson, J. W. (2011). Health economics and policy, OH: South-WesternKingdon, J. W. & Thurber, J. A. (2010). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies, NY: Longman