Challenges of Health care management (Essay Sample)

Challenges of Health care management
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Health care management refers to the general management and leadership of health care systems and health care networks. The health care management is currently facing numerous challenges that have a projected negative future impact in the medical field. Some of these challenges include; increase in the number of elderly persons, increase of patients in hospitals, hiking health care cost, new medical technologies, restrained government role, focus on profit making rather than on delivering, Infectious diseases and reemergence of other diseases. Some of these challenges have been debated upon by health policy makers and proved that health care management would impose serious challenges in the future (Mechanic 2005, 238).
Rising health care cost. In 2000 the health care spending was 14% of United States GDP. In 2001 the spending rose by 0.1%, according to Desroches and Blendon (2014) this cost has kept on increasing; in 2012 the cost increased to 17.7%. In the early 90s, it was believed that this increase in health care spending would be controlled through limiting the general spending by the government. Although it did contain the growth increase for a couple of years, the current performance of every person’s health plan portrays an impression that this cost containment method may not be the best. The government is likely to increase the health care cost. The Obamacare, for instance, is an attempt by the National Government to constrain Medicaid spending and Medicare. We definitely expect the Government to put a national limit on spending, this translates to pushing the public to pay more from their pockets for the care and health insurance they receive (Buerhas and et al 2009, 89).
Increase in the number of elderly people. It has been projected that U.S. citizens aged 75 and above will increase from 17 million to 19 million. Life expectancy is increasing as death rates decrease. These consistencies suggest a long term funding of health care and development of nursing homes. But reductions for retiree health benefits from the employer, reduced growth rate in the private long term insurance market, limited state budgets, health care trust fund projections suggests that U.S. Citizens aged 75 and above are likely to experience a shortage of some services and poor health care. Desroches and Blendon (2014) argue that citizens with a good private long term care insurance market and a quite higher income will obviously have a better option compared to the lower income earners and average income earners of whom depend majorly on public health financing.
Infectious diseases and reemergence of other diseases. In the early 90s, the medical researchers shifted their attention from infectious diseases to chronic diseases. This was in the view that infectious diseases were no longer a threat in the U.S. This belief has therefore changed as a result of a steady increase in HIV/AIDS both domestically and internationally, West Nile virus, acute respiratory syndrome and multi drug resistant bacteria. These are just a few infectious diseases that have led to the change in this belief. It is obviously clear that infectious diseases are posing a great threat and there is a need for rebuilding and restructuring the health system and specialization (Desroches and Blendon 2014).
Bioterrorism threat. The health care system is facing major challenges on how to deal with the aftermath of any terrorist attack. Such challenges include diversion of resources. In 2001 there was...