Disease Trends and Healthcare Delivery Essay

Statistics make the world go round, literally. A certain population or ethnicity and their disease trends can really have an effect on what can happen in the future for our healthcare systems. Demographics and Disease trends can go hand in hand with one another because disease trends are so constant and unnoticeable that it continues daily, therefore having a particular group being affected by the same disease. Some people do not believe it, but all you have to do is look at the statistics and you will then see how greatly they affect one another. To break things down, demographics are groups of people with a common link, such as; age, gender, race, education level, income level, even marital level, and etc. When in an environment where links are similar or the same, the same trends start to get picked up as well, linking you within the range of your demographics. Environment plays a big role in demographics as well. If you live in the same neighborhood or community as someone, you a re linked to that person no matter how small of importance it is. With everyone doing the same trends which come to them like habits, they may never go away until they know that it is a problem. Environment happens to play a role as well when it comes to demographics. Environment happens to play one of the main roles. Habits become hard to break because of the type of environment you around. Who, what, and the things that you are surrounded by happen to make up part of your environment, and it becomes hard to control when you get used to it and things become normal to you. An example would be; you stop by McDonald’s every day to get a Sunday just as a snack for the day. If that McDonalds was not so close to you, you would probably not have picked up the habit to buy an ice-cream. When you have so much or an environment surrounded by you that comes natural or that you see as being natural, it does not seem like anything to you because you do it in your everyday life. These things can affect your health and can affect the future of healthcare if gone unnoticed for so long. Even people play a big role in your environment. An example would be say you had a significant other. He liked to eat out all the times, but you liked home cooked meals bec ause that is what you were used to, but one day you said you did not feel like cooking and you at out. The one day changed everything and now you eat out just as much as your significant other and have begun to gain weight. It has become a habit for you to eat  out every day even though it seems so easy to stop. Well, that takes us to our next topic, obesity rates have gone up significantly throughout the United States. Of all countries, the United States has the highest rate of obesity. United States obesity rates have gone up from 13 percent in 1962 and estimates have increased to 19.4 percent in 1997, 24.5 percent in 2004, 26.6 percent in 2007 and 33.8 percent for adults and 17 percent for children in 2008. 2010 reports from CDC were said that numbers were still increasing counting 35.7 percent of the total American population for adults were obese and 17 percent of American children. Factors affecting obesity would be none other than environment. The fact that the United States has so many fast food services; people cannot help but to get dragged into being obese. Food is always in their faces or else they see someone else eating and crave it as well. Obesity has accounted for 100,000 to 400,000 deaths in the United States per year. It has increased healthcare use and expenditures. Obesity rates has cost society about 117 billion dollars in direct and indirect costs. It has exceeded the health care cost and will continue if obesity rates continue to go up. Obesity rates happen to be ore that that of the smoking and drinking rate and accounts for 6 percent to 12 percent of national health care expenditures in the United States. To reduce obesity rates, people can try switching up their everyday environments by going to a gym, going to a track, or even by just going to the grocery store and buying more healthy foods to cook and it. If people were to exercise as much as they eat, obesity rates could be lowered. The fact that children see things and grow up eating things they shouldn’t grows with them. Obesity rates could change in the future if children were taught to eat more healthy foods and not just foods that just taste good. There are so many things that people can do to reduce their own obesity rate. They can exercise three times a week and also eat healthier. Overall living a healthier lifestyle would help greatly. Changing the people around you as well can help. Choose to be around people that care about their health a lot or care about their health just as much as you do. You could always have a workout buddy, someone that will encourage you to lose weight. Even the fact of knowing that you could possibly be obese leading to more and more diseases can trigger something in someone to make them want to become a bit healthier. In the future of health care in the United States, there is really no way of  telling whether obesity rates will go down, but they could possibly go down drastically if the government, communities, societies, schools and cities come together annually and create awareness and activities that encourage people to lose weight, stay fit, and become healthy. Age can affect the U.S health care systems just as much obesity can. There are more modern medicines to help with diseases that were in the past. Let’s face it; now that we have more modernized medicines and machinery, people are living longer than they were 200 and 300 years ago. Today 40 million people in the United States are ages 65 and older. The number is to more than double to 89 million by 2050. The United States has a smaller share of older person than many developed countries, and its populations are graying at a slower pace. Environment definitely plays a role. People are aging slower within the United States because of more and more technology being implemented within the health care system. At this rate everyone will live until they are 100. It is not a bad thing to live a long life, but it does get harder when you get older and it often puts a burden on health care systems as well. The reason being is because elderly are more likely to be in high demand of healthcare and, getting help is expensive. The aging trend is likely to increase due to environmental factors. The more and more people that get older, the more and more nursing homes, and assisted living facilities begin to be built in order to help support the elderly. Retirement homes, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, happen to play a huge role in the United States. These homes often need a lot of co-workers as well which is really needed and in demand. Things that could be done to reduce health complications related to aging would be; living a healthy lifestyle no matter how old you are, and possibly make health care a little less expensive. Avoiding disease is the number one way to avoid getting complications in life when aging. Possibly choose a health plan that implements preventive health care and always get monthly and yearly screenings that could be recommended by your doctors. Health care delivery will most likely adapt to the United States environment in the future to provide care for age- related health issues by implementing more preventative care, making sure that everyone has health care coverage or are able to get it. Doctors and nurses need to be good at their jobs as well in order to catch even the hardest complications. There needs to be more  hospitals willing to accept a broad range of health issues and of course the number one thing would be price reduction. Health care will become a bit better than what it is now especially with the HITECH act in which is trying to put good use of information technology within hospitals, and physicians’ offices. As long as technology is always improving, the healthcare system improves as well. Health care delivery for obesity adaptation may get worse before it gets any better in such that people will not realize their issues until it is too late. In doing so this will trigger a movement within the United States that would make people want to change and teach their children as well. Health classes will begin to be implemented into elementary schools very early to teach children what are good foods and what aren’t. Instead of having soda machines and vending machines, machines are just going to be light snack machines and juice. In conclusion, healthcare delivery will change no matter what the case is. People play a big role in the future of health care and vice versa. With that being said, the only way for better adaptations would most probably be people actually wanting to change and more research within the world. With research, there comes, new inventions, with new inventions, there comes better technology to have in order to play roles within our lives. In order for change to occur within the future of health care, there has to be a change within people. When people decide to get up and take preventative measures within their own lives, and then their children life will then be when they decide to help the future of health care. Reference Jacobsen, L. (2009). America’s Aging Population. Retrieved from http://www.prb.org/Publications/PopulationBulletins/2011/americas-aging-population.aspx (2013). Obesity in the United States. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States â€Å"Statistics Related to Overweight and Obesity†. CDC. 2006. Retrieved 2009-01-23 F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America, 2008, Trust For America’s Health, pp. 10–11. Note: Defines â€Å"overweight† as BMI ≠¥25, â€Å"obese† as