health care financing

Health care financing aim to improve the wellbeing of patients and medical practice. Clients without insurance or available funds can receive the care they need while you receive payment on time. High health costs may impact your business more than you know, and patient financing offers a sustainable solution to not only providing patients with access to healthcare, but also increasing your client-base, enhancing the provider-patient relationship, and growing revenue.

What is Health care Financing?

Healthcare involves any medical procedure meant to improve a person’s wellbeing. HCF refers to the management of funds for these medical resources. On a personal level, this type of financing refers to payments regarding hospital care, physician care, dental care, prescriptions, and other personal medical services. When patients cannot pay out-of-pocket medical expenses, healthcare financing works as credit and enables them to receive care.

What it Means For Your Patient

When providers take it upon themselves to collect payments, the provider-client relationship may become strained.

Medical and financial conversations can be stressful. Placing both of these responsibilities on the doctor can complicate the patient-provider relationship in the examination room. Doctors must delicately balance relaying healthcare information with collecting balances owed by the patient — and with negligent patients, walk on eggshells and manage pressures in order to preserve a positive relationship.

With flexible financing options, doctors can have easier financial conversations with their patients, reducing the pressure to collect upfront or amounts past due. Patients will know the terms, conditions, and deadlines and can engage in a sustainable, budget-friendly payment plan.

What it Means For Your Practice

Medical costs continue to increase in the US. Whether measured by money per capita or percentage of GDP, the US spends more than any other nation on healthcare. These patterns of high-spending can negatively impact your business.

Providers waste significant time, energy, and money trying to collect payments from overdue patients. And, spending more on healthcare means spending less everywhere else. While a healthcare practice struggles to meet inflating healthcare costs, worker earnings may lie stagnant and jobs could migrate to less-expensive areas of the world.

Overall, high-spending healthcare systems are not sustainable. Healthcare financing enables more patients to choose a sustainable payment plan, reliably growing your client-base and contributing to your success. And with more clients comes more revenue.

Improve wellbeing on a personal and business level by providing healthcare finance options for your patients. How has provider-financing enhanced your healthcare experience?

What are the types of financing schemes for health care?

The main types are:

#1. government domestic revenues scheme,

#2. mandatory income-related insurance contributions,

#3. mandatory non- income related premiums,

#4. voluntary insurance premiums (risk-related or non-risk- related),

#5. domestic voluntary transfers, and

#6. foreign transfers.

In other words, the sources of HCF are government domestic revenues, mandatory income-related insurance contributions and insurance premiums, domestic voluntary transfers and foreign transfers.

The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA)

The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has the responsibility of administering the Medicare program, provided for in title XVIII of the Social Security Act, and Federal participation in the Medicaid program. The process used for making Medicare coverage determinations is largely a decentralized one.

What are the sources of HCF in Nigeria?

The major sources are:

#1. government budget using general tax revenue;

#2. direct out-of-pocket payments;

#3. social insurance schemes such as the Formal Sector Social Health Insurance Programme (FSSHIP) that is implemented by the National health insurance scheme;

Functions

the functions of HCF include revenue collection, pooling of resources, and purchase of health interventions.

Revenue collection

Revenue collection is how health systems raise money from households, businesses, and external sources.

pooling of resources

Pooling deals with the accumulation and management of revenues so that members of the pool share collective health risks, thereby protecting individual pool members from large, unpredictable health expenditures.

Prepayment allows pool members to pay for average expected costs in advance, relieves them of uncertainty, and ensures compensation should a loss occur.

Pooling coupled with prepayment enables the establishment of insurance and the redistribution of health spending between high- and low-risk individuals and high- and low-income individuals.

purchase of health interventions

Purchasing refers to the mechanisms used to purchase services from public and private providers. Figure 12.1 illustrates these functions and their interactions.