Why can't new nurses get jobs? Why are my insurance premiums rocketing up? Why is U.S. healthcare so much more expensive than healthcare anywhere else? Why is my hospital adding two new wings during a recession? Nurses Announcements Archive Article
The answer: the healthcare bubble. What it is and how to survive the "pop."
Is there a healthcare bubble?
The experts waffle, but facts are facts; between 1999 and 2011, government spending on healthcare increased 240 percent while GDP increased 62 percent. Health insurance premiums, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, have increased 168 percent between 1999 and 2011 while earnings increased only 50 percent (Foy, 2012). Such vast and rapid increases are not sustainable.
"The unfortunate fact is that Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as people in other developed countries, but receive lower quality care and less efficiency" (Colombo, 2012).
When value becomes detached from valuation, bubble problems start. Why we have a bubble is the subject of another article but we can see the effects in the proliferation of MRI machines, hospital wings, and new nurses (like myself). The indisputable truth is that all bubbles must pop.
Don't panic yet, however.
Bubbles are part of the modern economic cycle - observe the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, Japan's economic bubble. As this blog by Stan clearly articulates, bubbles have some benefits - increasing incomes and standard of living and improving access to certain technologies. Yes, they are painful when they pop - ask anyone who has sold a house in the last five years. But, big picture, there's not a lot we can do to stop them.
As Stan says, "Unfortunately, however, bubbles are difficult to detect as they occur because they typically begin with modest and innocent optimism. That makes bubbles inherently difficult to stop a bubble from forming. Besides, who wants to be the guy taking away the punch bowl as the party just gets started?"
I don't know when, how, or even if the healthcare bubble will pop. Perhaps America will grow into its ballooning healthcare. I have a feeling that sequestration will have something to do with it - the abrupt reduction in Medicare and Medicaid payments that will be happening in January (Anderson, 2012). There will always be a need for healthcare but perhaps not in its current bloated state. Looking ahead, here are 6 tips to surviving...