Healthcare Economics is a subset of economics that focuses on how societies produce, distribute, and consume health and healthcare. Since its inception, healthcare economics has been concerned with the efficiency and effectiveness at which individuals and governments value health and health-related products. The discipline acknowledges the numerous stakeholders in healthcare, among them patients, their families, physicians, nursing staff, governments, and educational institutions (Kotsopoulos and Connolly, 2014). This discussion compares macro-and microeconomic healthcare conditions concerning their impacts on patients from a nursing perspective.
On one hand, microeconomics emphasizes on the individual and communal economic activities. Conditions under this branch fall in the most basic context that allows individuals to produce and consume healthcare. Traditionally, people will make decisions based on quality, quantity, and price of the product in question. As applied to health care, microeconomics would tend to measure the level at with such indicators influence health seeking behavior among patients. In essence, quality and price will often determine the quantity of product consumption. However, in healthcare, other factors such as age, income, accessibility to care, and risk will influence one’s willingness to invest in healthcare (Lewis and Jack, 2009).
Contrarily, macroeconomics relies on the behavior and activities of the aggregate economy. The major macroeconomic conditions include the unemployment rate, national income, inflation, and poverty. These elements offer economic models through which the government understands and influences growth as well as policy. In this case, the macroeconomic element would look into how aggregate economic indicators influence healthcare policy. The policy, in turn, influences various patient-oriented health indices such as disease prevalence, health care utilization, insurance coverage, as well as mortality rates (Bernstein, 2009).
In the U.S, macroeconomic conditions play a significant role in shaping a variety of patient-health interactions. Notable examples are visible through changes in health coverage, financial access to healthcare, health seeking behavior, and health outcomes. That is, one can directly observe the effects of positive and negative economic growth as well as formulated policies. It follows that there should always exist enhanced awareness of visible disparities in the population’s access to healthcare. Thus, the incumbent government should consider renewing its commitment to improving and balancing the health statuses across all regions (Bodenheimer and Grumbach, 2012).
As a nurse, I acknowledge that slowed economic growth comes with undesirable conditions such as inflation, unemployment, and increased poverty. These conditions then cause dire effects on health care utilization, the cost of care, insurance coverage, and risk of illness. Particularly, most affected patients are those in low-wage and informal employment. Recessions strike a further blow to their wellbeing in cases that have uninsured populations. Evidently, investments and policies towards health care tend to decrease during in the event of economic downturn. The implications of such environments are that more people stay away from preventive health care (Holahan and McMorrow, 2013).
Through healthcare macroeconomics, nurses have a crucial role in assessing the effects of such changes on patient care. In doing so, they could advise patients on how to save and invest in healthcare. Also, they have an active role in influencing policy makers into making additional investments in healthcare. Such moves can help care for patients with no or limited access to healthcare. Evidently, nurse administrators are helping their hospitals and provider organizations to establish new healthcare financing schemes for at risk and vulnerable patients. They believe in the ability of such integration to reshape service delivery, reform legislation, and advance changes in patient health outcomes (Lewis and Jack, 2009).
References
Bernstein, J. (2009). Impact of the Economy on Healthcare. Washington, DC : Changes in Health Care Financing & Organization (HCFO).
Bodenheimer, T., & Grumbach, K. (2012). Understanding health policy: A clinical approach. San Francisco, CA: McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing.
Holahan, J., & McMorrow, S. (2013, May 7). Is The Recent Health Care Spending Growth Slowdown Sustainable Over The Long Term? Retrieved from Health Affairs: http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2013/05/07/is-the-recent-health-care-spending-growth-slowdown-sustainable-over-the-long-term/
Kotsopoulos, N., & Connolly, M. (2014). Is the Gap between Micro- and Macro-Economic Assessments in Health Care well understood? The case of vaccination and potential remedies. Journal of Markets Access and Health Policy, 2. doi:org/10.3402/jmahp.v2.23897
Lewis, M., & Jack, W. (2009). Health Investments and Economic Growth: Macroeconomic Evidence and Microeconomic Foundations. New York, NY: World Bank Policy Research.
