Healthcare Costs

I believe one of the major reasons for the rising cost of health care is the aging population.   The older an individual gets the more access he or she will need to healthcare.   An aging individual needs to maintain a level of preventative medicine in an effort to find problems and limit the services needed.   When accessing preventive services and problems are found the new and emerging treatments of the day have significant costs involved.   Because people find themselves without insurance they are not scheduling the preventative exams and when a problem is eventually found the costs of the treatments increase even more.
Another reason for the rising cost of healthcare is the economy.   Inflation affects all aspects of an economy.   The cost of everything is increasing; food, electricity, telephones, gasoline, automobiles and labor. According to the National Health Expenditure (NHE) the recession is anticipated to cause divergent trends in health spending growth for private and public payers in 2008 and 2009. This will cause projected faster growth in both Medicaid enrollment and expenditures; public spending growth on health care is projected to accelerate from 6.4 percent in 2007 to 7.4 percent by 2009. Medicare spending growth is likewise projected to be robust in 2008 and 2009 at approximately 8.0 percent per year. (CMS, 2010)
Another factor in the rising cost of healthcare is new technology and the costs associated with the implementation of these new procedures such as; the costs of new equipment, drugs and the salaries of the skilled people involved in providing the services. The development of new technology increases utilization of services and expenses increase. (Raffel, Raffel, Barsukiewicz, 2002)
  I am not convinced that the increase in healthcare spending is entirely a bad thing.   When comparing United States healthcare spending to other countries, if we have more means and access to cutting edge treatments as compared to Canada or the United...