Question

4. Why do prices for the same procedure differ so significantly from one facility to another? How are health care costs hidden from consumers?

5. What role does medicalization play in rising health care costs?

Answer 1

4. The  prices for the same procedure differ so significantly from one facility to another. This is so because the big hospitals who have a lot of branding all over the area always charge more for the services in the name of better quality and features. But this is not relevant to the genuine charges. Medical services are so much highly rated in these places that a common man cannot afford to live. Even the quality of services is not as supreme as they promise to provide in most of the cases. Health care costs are never shown to the customer in real. We never get to now how much over priced these services turn up to be.

5. Medicalization is a process by which human problems come to be defined and treated as medical problems. It involves the application of a biomedical model that sees health as freedom from disease and is characterised by reductionism, individualism, and a bias toward the technological. As a result we have developed numerous additional strategies to monitor health and prevent disease, including interventions in anticipation of diseases themselves when patients are still healthy or in a grey area of increased risk. New developments related to genomics and distributed point of care technologies will exacerbate a process of medicalization of health. This process is profoundly re-shaping how medicine interacts with the general population, states and policy makers and has implications for healthcare system design and individual health choices.