To What Extent Does the American Health Care Market Represent a Market Failure?

TO WHAT EXTENT DOES THE AMERICAN HEALTH CARE MARKET REPRESENT A MARKET FAILURE?

What: An enquiry into market failures that exist in the market for healthcare in America.
How: Individual and group research, analysis, application and judgement forming culminating in a group presentation.
Why: Healthcare markets represent the single largest markets in an economy and will continue to grow into the future.

The American healthcare market is a market worth $3.4 Tn, a market that represents around 18% of Total GDP (economic output). American Healthcare has seen rising costs like many healthcare systems and is based on a private insurance rather than state insurance system. Of the subtypes of health insurance coverage, employer-based insurance covered 55.7 percent of the population, followed by Medicaid (19.4 percent), Medicare (16.7 percent), direct-purchase (16.2 percent), and military coverage (4.6 percent). Around 12% of Americans have no health insurance and this number has risen from a low of 10% in 2016.

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How to compare health-care systems
BRITAIN'S National Health Service (NHS) was recently judged the "world's best health-care system" by the Washington-based Commonwealth Fund in its latest ranking of 11 rich countries' health provision. The Commonwealth Fund tends to give the NHS a pretty clean bill of health in its assessments (it also scores Switzerland, Sweden and Australia highly).

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2DA. To What Extent Does the American Health Care Market Represent a Market Failure?