Research Paper on:
HOSPITAL AND HEALTHCARE DISCUSSION

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
healthcare situation in which healthcare will be rationed. What some of these critics seem to forget is that there are at least two federally funded healthcare programs out there -  Medicare and Medicaid - and these two programs have had an impact on Americas hospital system. The interesting aspect about these government-funded programs is that they represent the largest insurer  of patients (Finkelstein, 2005), which is why its baffling that opponents to a single-payer option consider that a "socialist" system whereas Medicare and Medicaid are not.  But moving back to these programs impact on hospitals, Medicare was introduced in 1965, and though there are those who might point out that Medicare (and Medicaid,  also introduced that same year)) in and of itself hasnt raised healthcare costs, economic researcher Amy Finkelstein (2005) doesnt agree. Her research pointed out that "the impact of Medicare on  hospital spending is substantially larger than what the existing evidence from individual-level changes in health insurance would have predicted." She also points out a few other salient facts; for example,  Medicare had a huge impact on health insurance coverage for the elderly (increasing the proportion of elderly with hospital insurance by 75 percentage points) and that it even had an  impact on changes in medical treatment practice. She notes that the introduction of Medicare "appears to be associated with an increase in treatment intensity," based on spending, per day, per  patient. But it also increased real hospital expenditures between 1965 and 1970 by a whopping 23 percent for patients of ALL ages, not just the elderly (Finkelstein, 2005). We can  extrapolate a little further and point out that the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid have had a definite increase on the cost of healthcare - but what were missing is