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Healthcare Cost Essay

Decent Essays

Research Question and Hypothesis
Healthcare costs are out of control in the United States and effective ways of reducing costs have not been empirically identified. The citizens of the United States may hold the key to reducing healthcare. With confidence in the US Administration, law enforcement, national policies and Congress waning, people are becoming more negative. If there were a more positive outlook on where the country was going and the citizens felt empowered to make a positive impact for their country, would the number of ailments experienced by an individual decrease?
Five hypotheses will be explored:
1) If a person is considered optimistic, then they will have fewer medical visits, take fewer medications, have fewer …show more content…

Psychology & Health, 22(4), 431-455.
Annotation.
This article supports the hypothesis that optimism positively correlates to a reduction in upper respiratory infection (URI) symptoms and reported health status and that pessimism negatively correlates to URI symptoms and reported health status. However, the study challenged both optimism and pessimism as being bi-polar opposites as intended by the measurement tool and that optimism / pessimism may not be the personality measure to be tested. They hypothesized that positive / negative affectivity is the personality measure that leads to both level of optimism / pessimism and healthier outcomes.
The tool used to measure optimism / pessimism was the Life Orientation Model (LOT) (Scheier & Carver, 1985), which consists of eight questions: four suggesting optimism and four suggesting pessimism. The tool is graded on a scale that calculates the degree of optimism vs. pessimism assuming the two traits are bi-polar opposites. This study hypothesized that optimism and pessimism are not bi-polar opposites, but rather separate constructs to be viewed individually, similar to previous studies (Kubzansky, Kubzansky, & Maselko, 2004).
In addition, this study hypothesized that if one mediated the effect of optimism on health outcomes by removing the effect of a person’s affectivity inclination, negative or positive, that optimism would not be shown as the correlation variable. Rather the authors hypothesized,

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