Describe the Marketing and the New Health Care Law (Essay Sample)

Marketing and the New HealthCare Law
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Introduction
In healthcare sector, marketing is the passing of information about a health products or services with an aim to encourage the information recipients to purchase the health product or service or use it. Health care has undergone a lot of transformation over the past decades in the history of America. There are effects of the new reforms to the healthcare sectors on the providers of healthcare services and the consumers of these services mostly the health insurance beneficiaries.  Healthcare in America is undergoing the most dramatic change since the establishment of public health insurance programs commonly known as Medicare and Medicaid, which have brought new challenges and opportunities for for the health insurance providers and consumers. Studies show that the United States is one of the leading countries with a large number of companies providing health care insurance coverage to the public. Introduction of Patient Protection Act and the Affordable Care Act9 (commonly known as the Obama Care) into the health sector reforms have led to thousands of consumers shopping for health insurance like other commodities (Oliver, 2007). This is because enrollment of all the citizens to health insurance programs, either public or private is a requirement. It has in turn given health insurance consumers more control over the choice of plans they purchase. Health insurance companies have to scramble head- to- head for the available consumers of their products and services. The stiff competition in the healthcare sector necessitates the introduction of consumer-driven healthcare marketing to get a share of the consumers.
Speculations on Healthcare Marketing
Because thousands of citizens will enroll to the health insurance programs under the new Act, they will be keen on private and health insurance plans that provide fair price, good quality of healthcare, and other additional medical services available in the package. Currently many consumers are moving away from their employer’s insurance plans and purchased new plans that are most appropriate for their financial and medical needs. This is also the the case with new customers are looking out for many options of insurance plans that might best fit their needs. To benefit from this new way of purchasing health insurance, the insurance companies must move to adopt a marketing strategy to retain the existing customers and new subscribers to their plans. In the near future health care marketing is going to be entirely consumer focused to enable the companies to break-even. Marketing is going to play a major role in determination of the market share taken by a given company due to the presence of a perfect competition. With the increased access to information through internet and other mediums of communications, the public have varied sources of information regarding health care services (Cohn & Hough, 2008) Insurance companies, therefore, will have to utilize mediums like the internet to market their products to the consumers to gain more subscription to their insurance plans.
The new Act attempt seeks to lower healthcare cost and case of consumer adverse selection. This limits the ability of the providers to select their consumers in terms of health condition, age, gender and other factors. To fully overcome these challenges and still contain the healthcare cost, brand recognition and acceptance will form an integral part of the healthcare marketing. It is because; it will allow the health care providers to differentiate their health insurance brands from their competitors. It will also ensure that new consumers and are able to identify them among the many similar service providers. There is need for health insurance providers to check on ways to stand out among the crowd of many similar providers to attract customers. This may be through developing communications strategies that make an emotional connection with the prospective consumers (patient) and their caregivers. 
The new health care law aims at reducing health care cost as well as increasing health care coverage among the population. Health care cost, however, have risen faster than economic growth rate over the past few years. This calls posses a great challenge for insurance providers to contain the costs of health insurance services to be in line with the new law. To address this challenge, healthcare marketers will have to use the available demographic data of current customers to determine the most suitable coverage plans that are the consumers will purchase most. This will effectively reduce the cost of provision of the coverage, especially if the plan categories are according to factor like, occupation, age, gender etc. It will be easy to target the potential customers based on their rates by narrowing the large field down to those that are worth pursuing.
Health insurance providers and hospitals are so reluctant in embracing the importance of technology in marketing their product and services brands (American Marketing Association, 1997). This is evident by lack of well properly managed websites and blogs. Healthcare providers must change their notion of how the consumers adapt to technological changes and should use this avenue to show case their brands. Problems experienced in long queues and waiting rooms should be replaced by on...