Competing Needs Impacting and Policy Influencing Increasing Healthcare Costs

Increasing Health Cost Issues Paper
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Identify and describe at least two competing needs impacting your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
The two primary competing needs impacting the rising healthcare costs include the need to meet market competition while providing high-quality patient-centered care to patients. Provider competition, as well as localized practice trends, contributes to rising healthcare spending. Although competition constitutes the basis for a healthy economy, it is not a feasible strategy to support the healthcare markets' performance (Chernew et al., 2021). Healthcare is a typical market failure example with respect to economic theory from both supply and demand sides. Patients are not ordinary consumers based on the demand economics, mainly because the disease makes an individual vulnerable, thus increasing their susceptibility to "financial blackmail."
According to provision four of the ANA code of ethics for nurses, registered nurses (RNs) have the responsibility, accountability, and authority to make the decision and influence nursing practice, including taking actions congruent to the need to foster health outcomes as well as deliver optimal care (Davies, 2022). Gaps in information asymmetry of patients within nursing are guided by RNs and physicians who cultivate the principal-agent interaction with the consumer at the micro tier and address third-party payers' issues for macro-level prescribed healthcare. This makes patients unaccountable for their illnesses' costs. Therefore, the interaction between market competition and the ANA Code of Ethics principle for nurses impacts healthcare costs due to the lack of prescription expense accountability (Garattini & Padula, 2019). This potentially creates a moral hazard for the patients and nurses, thus undermining consumer ability to access affordable healthcare services.
Describe a relevant policy or practice in your organization that may influence your selected healthcare issue/stressor.
As noted above, the interaction between providers and patients within a competitive healthcare system might offer the impetus for moral hazard. Patient moral hazard entails the consumer's increased usage of healthcare services or deterioration in preventive care because of insurance coverage. Given its role in rising health costs, the organization has implemented policy to address this phenomenon. The organization has developed an approach to change consumer behavior prior to seeking health services. Community empowerment entails developing wellbeing-promoting behaviors via community health education and fostering individual awareness of the role of insurance as well as the implications of unnecessary utilization of healthcare services (Koohi-Rostamkalaee et al., 2022). Community empowerment inter...