Unemployment levels are rising, and that’s not good news for those who also lose their health insurance along with their jobs.
This leads to decrease in medical service utilization, as people cancel appointments and delay elective services.
Hospitals are seeing “a huge decrease in M.R.I.’s, CAT scans, stress tests, cardiac catheterization tests, knee and hip replacements and other elective surgery.”
On one hand, there is some question about whether some advanced imaging scans and diagnostic tests are necessary, so cutting down on these tests may not seem so bad from a health cost standpoint.
However, legitimate preventive visits are also being skipped, which may further escalate health costs as diseases will be caught at a later, more expensive, stage.
Related posts:
- Why controlling health care costs is so difficult
- Medicare and cutting health care costs
- Rationing care is inevitable to control health care costs
- How will the economy affect the prospects for health reform?
- Breast MRIs
- What is responsible for high health care costs?
- Health care costs, not the uninsured
{ 1 comment }
I don’t believe the economy will cause healthcare prices to increase. I think the free market will close down places that provide mediocre healthcare, leaving the good providers in business. These providers will take up the slack and because of the huge increases in volume, costs may actually go down. For more discussion on this and other healthcare topics please visit, http://www.takingcontrolofyourhealthcare.com.
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