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Medical Technology In The United States

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1. Although medical technology brings numerous benefits, what have been some of the main challenges posed by the growing use of medical technology in the United States?
One of the main challenges regarding the growing use of medical technology in the United States is the growing costs that go along with these changes. These state of the art machines as well as new drug and biological developments come at huge costs which in turn are partially paid by patients and consumers. This has led to huge increases in the average costs of healthcare (Begay, “Technology” Lecture, 10/31/17).
2. How do American belief and values influence the use of medical technology? The United States is a capitalistic country in which a person’s status in society is …show more content…

Capitation consists of paying doctors a lump some each year that consists of a fee paid to them for each patient who they guarantee to care for throughout the year (Duston, 2015). This shares risk with the provider because now their money is being pooled into the group that was initially established to reduce risk of high medical costs. With fee-for-service, doctors are paid based on the number of services they provide (Begay, Lecture, 10/26/17) which allows for costs to rise because some doctors intentionally or unintentionally increase the services they provide to ensure a higher salary. With capitation, doctors are pooled in and the amount of money they make is controlled by how many patients they see not how many labs they run or surgeries they provide, this in turn prevents unnecessary healthcare costs.
7. What is meant by the term “health care costs”? Describe the three different meanings of the term “cost”.
Health care costs refers to the amount of money spent on all aspects of medicine and health measures taken to make people healthy. The three types of cost are the price, expenditure and physician perspective. Price refers to the money for certain health measures that the consumer pays to the hospital/doctor and insurance premiums. Expenditure is the amount of money spent by all consumers/insurance companies for such services. The third perspective of cost relates to doctors and how much of their profit they have to invest in maintaining their practice
(Begay, Lecture,

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