Healthcare availability - Essay Example

A growing number of employers in Utah have become incapable of coping with the continuously increasing cost of healthcare, which has compelled large numbers of businesses to stop providing insurances for their employees. This produces an unfavorable feedback cycle: rising healthcare costs enlarges the population of uninsured and thus either raises healthcare premiums and costs for people who do not have insurance or boost healthcare costs for the state since the uninsured uses public services (Poulsen, Matsumori & Kroes, 2008).

Hospitals in Utah are particularly distressed by uncompensated care since majority of their healthcare providers are currently paid a fixed pay. Doctors receive this pay irrespective of the capacity of the patients to pay (Poulsen et al., 2008), putting the weight of delivering uncompensated care on the hospitals. Furthermore, people who do not have insurance usually need more costly procedures because of the absence of primary and preventive care visits. According to the Utah Department of Health (UDOH), Utah locals who are uninsured are less probable to have had a common healthcare source or a regular health check visit (Books Llc., 2010). These locals are also more probable to demand primary care from an urgent care facility or emergency center, which is usually more costly than healthcare services provided by a primary care professional.

Furthermore, doctors and hospitals are often not entirely paid for giving care to locals who are entitled to publicly subsidized services (Young et al., 2010) like Medicare or Medicaid. When healthcare practitioners and medical facilities ‘dismiss’ an important part of healthcare provisions, it boosts the cost of health insurance premiums. Nevertheless, raised premiums consequently forces employers to discharge workers and small businesses to shut down, swelling the population of uninsured and producing an unfavorable feedback