The cost of healthcare
One of the significant milestones in healthcare is cost, and it is a known limiting factor when it comes to healthcare delivery (Shi &Singh, 2012). Sometime last year, I worked as a Medical Technologist in Puerto Rico and gained a great understanding as a sales representative at the administrative level. As its territory, Puerto Rico is known to take part in every healthcare reform of the United States. Much of the laboratory industry is very different from what is there in the mainland. Around the island, you find many small clinical laboratories that mainly work basic tests. The specialized tests are usually sent to the local reference laboratories for further work and scrutiny. Due to the rising market competition, the prices on the special tests have gone down marginally. This has also led medical insurance companies to reduce the amount they charge for each test. Consequently, small labs have suffered closure due to the costs of operation involved against the insurance companies’ reimbursements.
In the above instance, the small labs incur costs of operation such as staffing, purchasing equipment, rental space, and the purchase of supplies. When the local reference laboratories turn to less sensitive methods of testing to reduce costs and provide lower-cost services to their clients, the quality of health care the patients get is then affected. At that moment, whether you have health insurance or not does not matter since the quality of services is the same to all. To access better test results, patients have to travel a long way and frequently due to the small labs closure, and sometimes they do not always get their test results in time. Even though state and federal policies are considering establishing healthcare reforms to make healthcare affordable and accessible, some of these reforms involve changing healthcare market structures. This poses an even higher risk for certain populations who cannot access healthcare currently (Wicks, 2009).