Thursday, 16 December 2021 15:54

Healthcare is a service industry

healthcare healthcare pixabay

Healthcare providers are businesses, which means healthcare can be reduced to an equation in which Healthcare = Healthcare Providers' Revenue - Healthcare Providers' Expenses.

Healthcare providers are nothing without their revenue. They would not be able to survive without patients coming through their doors willing to pay for the services they provide. However, there is one major issue that is currently facing providers everywhere:

Patients aren't willing to pay the price for healthcare anymore .

At first glance, this may seem intuitively correct—after all, who wants to spend thousands of dollars per year on medical bills? Unfortunately, when you look at it from a business perspective, it makes absolutely no sense. A lack of paying customers meansthat healthcare providers are left with only the sickest of patients—patients who are unable to financially support them. Healthcare should not be a luxury offered only to those that can afford it, but right now, that's exactly what it is.

The reason for this lack of paying customers comes down to one issue: availability . Healthcare has become readily available and the barrier of entry into the world of healthcare has been diminished as a result. When healthcare was difficult for people to attain, they were more willing to pay higher prices because they knew how important it was; after all, you're not going to pay thousands of dollars if you don't need surgery or an operation! Nowadays, there's no such thing as "unaffordable" medicalcare. Healthcare has become available to everyone and, as a result, people don't see the need to pay such high prices for it anymore (even though it is still super expensive).

As we can see, patients aren't willing to pay for healthcare anymore because there is no longer a scarcity of providers . The market has gotten flooded with competition and because of this, providers can no longer charge their customers whatever they want without consequences. As a business owner myself, I completely understand the logic behind that sentiment—after all, when you have nothing but competition, you can't afford to lose any potential customer or else you'll go under! Healthcare providers everywhere are in the same boat: they need every single paying customer they can get in order to stayafloat, and the only way to make them pay is by making healthcare scarce again.

The solution seems obvious: create a scarcity of Healthcare Providers . Healthcare will become valuable once again if patients have a limited number of choices. Healthcare providers need to stop treating healthcare as a right and start treating it as a luxury item that can't be enjoyed without paying the price—and they need to start acting like it. Healthcare cannot be treated as something everyone deserves at all times; people must understand they won't always be able to go see their doctor whenever they want or else they'll end up with no money left in their pockets. Healthcare is most definitely needed but this does not mean it's affordable for everyone.