The cost of health care services has escalated remarkably recently, pushing individuals in the middle and lower classes into the circumstance of being unable to afford them. The ongoing trend of this discourse over whether the advantages outweigh its disadvantages is complex. However, this essay will look at both the pros and cons of this phenomenon and provide some relevant examples.
On the one hand, from the perspective of companies that provide health care services, there are significant advantages. This is because a company must follow a legal mandate, so the responsibility of ensuring a return on investment to stakeholders is the top priority mission that any business must fulfill in order to develop further. By providing costly services to citizens, providers can maximize their profits based on the fees they charge per patient. The higher revenue they gather can be reinvested in research and development for new treatments and pharmaceuticals. For example, the cost of inventing a new type of medicine or vaccine ranges from 1.5 to 2 billion dollars. The accumulation of funds over time is crucial in order to cover these expenses.
However, the increased cost of healthcare might cause severe damage to individuals and society as a whole. Although authorities allocate funds for the research of new medications, a considerable amount of the fees private companies charge their patients is unreasonable, making optimal facilities and higher-experienced doctors inaccessible to many citizens. Moreover, some low socio-economic patients struggle to deal with their illnesses and diseases because of the unaffordability of the situation they are in.
To conclude, the negativity of this trend might overshadow its positivity due to some ethical concerns that arise while operating costly services. While there are real challenges that we need to overcome to make the health system more accessible, the disadvantages of high healthcare costs seem to outweigh the advantages.