James Moore-Stanley edited sectionIntroduction_.tex  almost 8 years ago

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\section{Introduction}  Despite the standard of healthcare being roughly equivalent to other highly economically developed countries (as indicated by life expectancy statistics), countries,  consumer spending per capita on healthcare in the United States is much higher than the other top ten economically developed nations in the world, with spending in 2014 at \$9,086 per capita. This amounts to spending on healthcare representing over 17\% of Gross Domestic Product in the United States.This therefore would indicate that the structure of the market is to blame; the United States is the only member of these countries to have an almost entirely privately funded healthcare system. Other high-income nations such as the United Kingdom and France have government sponsored programs to help its citizens pay for their healthcare; these are the National Health Service (NHS) and Couverture Maladie Universelle (CMU) respectivly, and it was only recently that the United States introduced legislation for this in the form of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. \\Only 'free market' or 'private market' structure would potentially lend itself an oligopoly of health insurance providers, as there are realistically only a small number of firms that have sufficient capital to offer the public masses insurance policies. However, other reasons also accountable for this high expenditure, namely inefficiencies in the healthcare market. This may be because of firms wishing to maximise profit at the expense of absolute inefficiency, among other theories. The underlying evidence of high expenditure on healthcare is undeniably empirical, but the research question allows an investigation to ascertain if this seemingly unnecessary expenditure is due to only one factor, or if it is due to a variety of factors.   \\It must also be noted that a high proportion of income in the United States is dedicated to healthcare, either through insurance premiums or direct payment to hospitals. This makes the conclusion of this essay relevant to hundreds of millions of people, as the cause of the inefficiency in the market may be able to be rectified. Methods of determining the primary cause of inefficiency are suitable to be subjected to economic analysis through use of primary and secondary data. This will be done by determining if there is indeed an oligopoly of insurance providers, determining average costs and marginal revenues to ascertain if abnormal profits are being made, among other analyses. Other areas to be considered are administrative inefficiency, consumer choice, allocative inefficiency, and productive inefficiency.