The Budget Cuts of Healthcare Administration:
The Effect and Strategies
Don Nguyen Michael Lange March 18, 2013

The Budget Cuts of Healthcare Administration:
The Effect and Prevention Over the years, the budget has been reducing for health care administration. There is more attention in the healthcare field as the budget gets smaller. Issues arise in the public that deals with the relationship between the state and community's health. In the United States, there had been many problems over the years that arise from the spending. The current state the nation is has a very expensive cost where the cost of medical care and healthcare rises every year. It affects many citizens in the community in one way or another. The health care cost has been rapidly rising over these past years and it's hard to make it more available and affordable for everyone. Americans have a hard time finding good doctors with or without health insurance. The Public healthcare over the last century changed drastically with the new industrialism and urbanization. The quality of life and life style improved as they made changes in hygiene and sanitation. Taking money out of the health care field is just going to add more problems and put the field into a deeper hole. The function of healthcare administration is to prevent health problems before they begin and to cure it when it happens. So a lot of time and money is spent making a healthy and hard working population.
Health Care Cost Curve Many current proposals for reform does a downward shift in the curve but does not affect it's long term goals. Rather than cutting the budget, Roehrig offers an idea to curve and blend the health care cost so it is easier to adapt with while saving money. This revolves around the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) where the spending share is unsuitable for many reasons. The GDP includes the impact on federal and state budgets, employers and families. There is a line where the spending and GDP should be the same but the GDP is higher than spending. If the GDP keeps increasing so does the cost for health care spending (Roehrig, 2011). Federal Cuts Approximately 85 billion dollars in annual federal is spent in cuts controlled by the Budget Control Act of 2011 (Gray, 2013). These cuts were to increase tax and have budget reduction but due to a setback, the spending reduction is going to affect a large range of areas in the health field. Some of areas include programs in healthcare, defense, education, and agriculture. Three key areas that should be worried about are the hospitals, physicians and research. With the hospitals, Medicare reimbursement will decrease and the skilled nursing facilities are set back 4.5 billion dollars. With cuts like these, are expected layoffs in the nursing department where it represent the largest employment in hospitals. Medicare also affects the physician where they might stop accepting Medicare from their patients. As for research, it slows down federal agencies like the U.S National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, and U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their funding for projects is cut back about 5 percent which is about 2.5 billion all together (Gray, 2013). These research projects are typically long term effort which makes it harder to estimate to finishing.
Strategies for Reducing Costs The administrative cost in the U.S healthcare system consumes about 361 billion dollars annually. We only use about 14 percent of all the spending inside our nation while half the total spending is considered wasteful. Wikler says if the problem can be found to lower administrative cost, it will offer a promising opportunity for reducing health care costs while improving patient care (Wikler, 2012). Administrative exists in all levels of the health care system. Some ways to reduce the burden on the cost is by switching more to the electronic capabilities.