Healthcare insurance helps facilitate access to care and outweighs the costs of added services. Therefore, insurance policies make it easy for patients to afford expensive medical services. Although the patients benefit the most from health insurance, hospitals are enabled to run smoothly due to available funds. A fee-for-services payment model allows organizations to unbundle services and pay for them separately. Meanwhile, a pre-paid health plan model involves a third party that contracts healthcare providers to offer their services to members in exchange for a subscription fee.
Although the fee-for-service was popular health insurance, societal developments made it wane. The pre-paid health plan is the common model adopted in many countries. According to Jeremiah 33:6, quality and affordable healthcare services enhance prosperity and security (King James Bible Online, n.d.). Consequently, healthcare organizations encourage the adoption of the pre-paid payment model to avoid the jostle of patients being unable to afford services (Nelson, 2020). Additionally, the model is beneficial among organizations and businesses since their employees remain active and productive at work (Fang et al., 2019). Therefore, the pre-paid health plan is better than the fee-for-service model.
Although patients under the pre-paid health plan have access to quality and affordable healthcare, various medical reforms affect service delivery. The need for hospitals to integrate technology into their service delivery has increased the costs of medical care. For instance, advanced healthcare organizations utilize complex technologies in detecting diseases. Consequently, businesses and other corporations shy away from adopting pre-paid plans due to their financial burdens. Additionally, governments, through progressive labor laws, are making it mandatory for employers to offer medical coverage. Therefore, many employers opt for cheaper medical alternatives that are not beneficial to the patients. The changing medical technology and labor laws are significantly affecting the financial delivery of medical services.
References
Fang, He, Rozelle, Shi, Sun, & Yu. (2019). Heterogeneous impacts of Basic Social Health Insurance on medical expenditure: Evidence from China’s New Cooperative Medical Scheme.Healthcare, 7(4), pp. 131.
King James Bible Online. (n.d.). Jeremiah 33:6 KJV: “Behold, I will bring it health and cure, and I will cure them and will reveal unto them the abundance…”.
Nelson, I. (2020). Ensuring gender and social equity in health: An analysis of Nigeria’s Social Health Insurance Scheme and Basic Health Care Provision Fund.The Lancet Global Health, 8, pp. S8.