HEALTHCARE AND GOVERNMENT POLICY

Healthcare and Government Policy



New Health Bill

Introduction

The study is related to the health bill which focuses on the promotion of health care in United Kingdom, besides it, it also compare the healthcare in UK with the healthcare in India as it provides gaps which should be filled by the policy makers. In addition to this, the study also entails the evidence based management which is being discussed in context of UK health care. In addition to this, in context of promotion of health care in United Kingdom, issues and debates concerning healthcare delivery generally centre on several related issues: how do different models of healthcare delivery affect the quality of care delivered? How do the different models affect the costs of providing healthcare, and who should have the right to make decisions about the healthcare of other people? These questions about methods of healthcare delivery have their root in two facts: health is an issue about which most people care intensely, and providing optimal healthcare can be a very expensive proposition in the modern world (Anderson, Armour and Finkelstein, 2010, 44-51).

Moreover, two additional facts contribute to the rising costs of healthcare that are behind many of the most heated debates about healthcare delivery. One is that usually people do not pay directly for their healthcare: instead it is covered by general tax revenues, by specific government programs, or by private insurance. In any case, the amount an individual pays to support the system may have no direct relationship to the costs of services that he or she uses (although he/she may be required to make a copayment or pay for a small percentage of those services) and hence he or she does not know the actual costs of the services received and has little incentive to try to limit those costs (Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, Institute of Medicine, 2001, 46-59). A second fact is that providing goods and services to the healthcare market can be an extremely lucrative business and thus an incentive exists to create and provide those goods and services independent of whether they contribute substantially to the presumed goal of improving the recipient's health (Bate & Robert, 2006, 307-310).

As noted in a 2000 report by the World Health Organization (WHO), the medical and financial aspects of healthcare delivery cannot be separated. This is because much of what modern healthcare offers is far too expensive for most individuals to pay out of pocket, and a single serious illness or accident could easily bankrupt the resources of a family if they had to pay all expenses themselves. Many discussions about access to healthcare are really about access to the money necessary to pay for care or the ability to require someone else to pay it (Bate & Robert, 2006, 307-310). For instance, if the U.K. government determines that Medicare will pay for a particular service, that means essentially that U.K. taxpayers will pay for it, while if a private insurer is ...