Private Health Care Case Analysis

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You faint, feel light-headed or experience some sort of abnormal event that requires you to finally pay a visit to your physician. The story goes downhill from there. You are diagnosed with some sort of health disease, perhaps stage 3 breast cancer, and the doctor says the tumor is still growing! In front of you, lay your treatment options of chemotherapy that can reach about $120,000. It 's intriguing to know that your private health care insurer would much rather pay for your treatment options than the chemopreventive care you should have received. Why is this the case? This paper focuses primarily on the preventive care, specifically mammograms for customers of private for-profit health care insurers and whether they should continue spending …show more content…

Bernie states that the private companies are less concerned about providing quality affordable health care than “to make as much money as they can. Eric finishes with a statement in which Bernie says that no money will be made from health care until we strengthen in primary care. In return, this matches patients with the right doctor and reduces the number of emergency room visits.“What we need to do is greatly expand primary health care, put money into disease prevention, and come up with a system which is not designed to make the drug companies and insurance companies rich, but to provide quality care to all of our …show more content…

Reid refutes this claim by introducing Wynder’s discovery which has saved millions of people from contracting tobacco-induced cancer. However, in the case of a mammogram which doesn’t seem to save as many lives as expressed by the 5 more women who survived in the Canadian study, the preventive care is not worth it. In fact, 10% of all men treated surgically for prostate cancer experience impotence or urinary incontinence to false diagnoses and radiation poisoning. In addition, an article in the New York Times states that one woman who starts screening in her 40s, two in their 50s and three in their 60s, out of 1000, will avoid a breast cancer-related death. I believe these statistics are concrete reasons why for-profit private companies should stop spending on mammogram preventive care. 2,500 women would have to be screened over 10 years for a single breast cancer death to be avoided. Wynder’s discovery may have saved billions of lives, but mammogram tests do not contest to those saved lives as expressed through the statistics

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