Stakeholder Dynamics

Stakeholder Dynamics

Tracey Jones

MHA 601: Principals of Healthcare Administration

Dr. Matthew Caines

June 21, 2014

The Hospital system is a provider of care for most of the population at some point. For the patients receiving the care, hospital costs can be very expensive especially for those without insurance. So, the uninsured complications have substantial impacts on the hospitals as a provider. The cost increases due to bad debt and uncollected funds for those patients that did not have any payor source. Reguardless to a patient’s insurance status they can not be denied treatement at an emergency room. So, this increases the amount of patients cared for throughout the hospital and if a high precentage are uninsured then the moneies coming into the the hospital are decreased.

The causes of this rate of uninsurance remain a matter of political debate. Rising insurance costs have contributed to a trend in which fewer employers are offering health insurance, and many employers are managing costs by requiring higher employee contributions. Many of the uninsured are the working poor or are unemployed. Others are healthy and choose to go without it. Some have been rejected by insurance companies and are considered "uninsurable". Some are without health insurance only temporarily. Some choose faith-based alternatives to health insurance. (Wikipedia) According to Gallup's most recent data, 13.4 percent of Americans lacked health insurance in April. That's down from 15 percent in March and 18 percent in the third quarter of 2013 (Cohn, E.)

Many emergency rooms are overcrowded already but uninsured patients flood public hospitals, increasing the population, putting them at risk due to severe financial strain on the system that may force hospitals to close the doors. It is illegal for a public hospital not to provide services to a patient in need. More than half the patients seeking care at these healthcare systems are uninsured or covered by Medicaid,...