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Sacha Hammack History And Evolution Of Health Care Economics University of Phoenix HCS/440 History and Evolution of Health Care Healthcare is an everyday thing to Americans now in the Twenty-first Century but before the 1900’s this would have been a totally different concept. Economics is the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, or the material welfare of mankind. There are several different reasons that healthcare economics have changed but the most substantial reason would be the supply and demand of care.
This paper is going to discuss the history and the evolution of health care and supply a timeline showing where the certain aspects of health care history came in. Supply and Demand is the relation between things that cause the price of something to be set. There are millions of people in the world who are in need of care and the more care people need the more equipment and treatments are needed. There is new technologies coming out every year and new treatments causing prices to go up, this is where supply and demand comes in.
Health care is one of the largest items that are going to have a supply and demand because of the needs of its patients. The more that people get sick the greater the need for health care, this may not be the best thing for certain patients because with the greater demand for health care the higher the costs may go. During the 1900’s the American Medical Association (AMA) started to become a force that was found nationwide. During the 1900’s surgery was becoming the common thing for doctors to do, thus leading to patients having to pay money for their care.
This has lead to the change in how people pay for their care and therefore making the way for funding of health care. Before this time doctors where just people who happened to be taking care of people, but when the AMA was formed it lead to there being a place for the profession of Doctors and Nurses. During the great depression in the 1930’s slowed the expansion of health care in the United States because people where so poor they could not afford to pay anything for their health care. “Between 929 and 1930, average hospital receipts plummeted from more than $200 per patient to less than $60. Hospitals then began to turn to insurance plans as a way to guarantee a steady cash flow by spreading the financial risk. ” (Wasley, 1993). This is where health care insurance started to become a large aspect of care for people in the United States. This is also the time where supply and demand became hard for people because there was a great need for care but not money to pay for the care.
Health care economics changed in the 1940’s and 1950’s when employers started to offer their employees health care, this made health care a gross domestic product, or the market value of care for Americans. During the 1950’s and 1960’s amendments where made because not all people where employed and a lot of elderly could not work therefore they were unable to get health insurance or pay for the medical care that they needed. This started the Medicaid and Medicare reforms making it the Governments need to help pay for care.
Health care started out with people paying full price for their care, this did not start out as monetary but it was people using whatever they had to pay from livestock to food items, but as time went along Americans found ways to get care without paying full price because of the costs being out of control to pay right out of pocket. This has lead to the way that our health care is in this century, we are left paying a percentage and the insurance companies or the Government picks up whatever cannot be paid.
There are several spots in history where health care can be seen with a great amount of change and we will continue to see this change because we are a generation of people who are less likely to care for ourselves, thus causing more demand for the health care that we are receiving and the way that we pay for health care. This is seen with the current health care reform being put into place by President Obama with the need for everyone to have health care by the year 2012.
We will continue to see how the care of patients and the economic areas leave us. Wasley, T. (1993). Health care in the twentieth century: a history of government interference and protection. Business Economics, Retrieved from http://findarticles. com/p/articles/mi_m1094/is_n2_v28/ai_13834930/pg_3/? tag=content;col1 health care crisis. (n. d. ). Retrieved from http://www. pbs. org/healthcarecrisis/history. htm