Economic Terms Hcs 440

Economic Terms and Healthcare History Paper

HCS/440

June 25, 2012

Dawn Chiabotti, PhD

Economic Terms and Healthcare History

The economics of health care has been experiencing transformations throughout the course of the country’s history. In 2010, health care costs were about 17.68% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) with a projected growth of 19.8% by 2020 (Cummins, 2011, para. 2). This paper will reflect the history and evolution of health care economics. The document will also reflect some key terms, such as, economics, supply and demand, microeconomics, macroeconomics, elasticity, inelasticity, and gross domestic product.

In the 1920s’ health insurance was nonexistent because many individual decided not to have insurance but to have sickness insurance. Health care began its own evolving story, starting with a standard service performed in exchange for a fee. In the 1920s’ the state of medical technology meant services for patients were low and many patients were treated in their home. The approach for supply and demand insurance provided and who would consider coverage.

Sickness insurance tended to provide a supplementary income with modern disability insurance and was more favorable in the 1900s’ because at this time salaries from missing employment were far in excess of the cost of health care, which was scarce and less relied on than today. The sickness fund was a kind of health insurance that stepped into relieve the effects of financial shock suffered as a result of unemployment or missing work was often “sufficiently competent and fair in their delivery of financial and…medical assistance” (Murray, 2007, para. 1).

Health insurance was rarely used in the twentieth century and remained that way. As medicine began to advance, treatment gradually moved out of homes to hospitals. By the early nineteenth century, the American Medical Association (AMA) began creating licensing standards and better standards for medical...