Nearly every American can agree that our current health care system needs reforms. Primarily do to the fact that 45.7 million Americans are without health insurance. That's approximately 16 percent of Americans who sometimes have to do without healthcare, or face crucial financial responsibility. The main issues are admission to healthcare, and the affordability of health care. Before 1920, doctors didn't know enough about diseases to really provide useful care to sick people. Therefore the...
Health insurance, too many American citizens, is not an option. However, some citizens find it unnecessary. Working in the health care field, I witness the effects of uninsured patients on medical offices. Too often, I see a “self-pay” patient receive care from their doctor and then fail to pay for it. Altogether, their refusal to pay leaves the office at a loss of money and calls for patients to pay extra in covering for the cost of the care the uninsured patient received. One office visit does not seem like too big of an expense, but multiple patients failing to pay for the care they receive adds up. Imagine the hospital bills that patients fail to pay; health services in a hospital are double, sometimes triple, in price at a hospital. It is unfair that paying patients are responsible for covering these unpaid services. Luckily, the Affordable Care Act was passed on March 23, 2010, otherwise known as Obamacare. Obamacare is necessary in America because it calls for all citizens to be health insured, no worrying about pre-existing conditions, and free benefits for men and women’s health.
The American Health Care system has prided itself on providing high quality services to the citizens who normally cannot afford them. This system has been in place for years and until now it did a fairly decent job. The problem today is money; the cost of hospital services and doctor fees are rising faster than ever before. The government has been trying to come up with a new plan these past few years even though there has been strong opposition against a new Health Care system. There are many reasons why it should be changed and there are many reasons why it shouldn’t be changed. The main thing that both sides heads towards is money. Both sides want to save money just in different ways.
Before Obamacare was passed, millions of Americans were uninsured, suffered and died prematurely each year since lack of health insurance. Insurance companies could deny any one for pre-existing illnesses or drop them when they get sick, or stop treating them when they touched annual or life-time perimeters. Over 60% of bankruptcies were associated to medical expenses, several of these people had insurance. Insurance companies had no limits on raising premiums. Preventative measures and wellness visits were not covered adequately (Mowrey, 2013).
The facts bear out the conclusion that the way healthcare in this country is distributed is flawed. It causes us to lose money, productivity, and unjustly leaves too many people struggling for what Thomas Jefferson realized was fundamental. Among industrialized countries, America holds the unique position of not having any form of universal health care. This should lead Americans to ask why the health of its citizens is “less equal” than the health of a European.
Because of this “approximately twenty to forty-five thousand people die in the United States each year due to a lack of health insurance.” (Obamacare) Not only that but “about fifty-three million Americans have admitted, with or without insurance, they cannot afford to see a doctor.” (LUHBY)
The current state of affairs in the development of health policy in the United States is that it is constantly in flux and its implementation is disorganized and inefficient. As was the case with the recently passed Affordable Care Act legislation, political and lobbying interests often intersect in a manner that makes meaningful, most appropriate changes unlikely. The ACA kept in place the fractured nature of American health care and insurance, and appears to have benefited insurance companies by increasing enrollments rather than making the care provided better on a large scale. The majority of the plans on the created exchanges, up to 87%, are funded by federal subsidies (Blumenthal, Abrams, & Nuzum, 2015). These plans must cover individuals regardless of pre-existing conditions. The burden of the cost of insurance shifted to tax-payers and the young/healthy who are now overly burdened with mandatory coverage that they may or may not need in
The meaning of quality is “the right care for the right person at the right time”. Quality can be well-defined as the value, efficiency, consistency, and outcome of the care being provided. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Service’s (CMS) stated “an rise in health care spending from $2.34 trillion in 2008 to $ 2.47 trillion in 2009, the largest one year increase since 1960” (Pickert, 2010). “The action to improve the American health care delivery system as a whole, in all of its quality dimensions such as efficiency, effectiveness, equitability, timeliness, patient-centeredness, and safety for all Americans” (IOM, 2011). This paper aims to find out the relationship between cost and quality relating to health care.
My personal experience with health care has been obscure and limited. I grew up very poor and spent the majority of my life in low income housing. We had virtually no health care and after a while, it began to take a toll on my family’s well-being. My sister and I had check-ups every other year, but no other benefits such as dental care. In second grade I had several health complications. For two weeks I had constant pain in my chest and couldn’t go to school. Even when it became unbearable, my mom refused to take me to the E.R. because she knew the medical bills would be outrageous. I had to pass out from the pain for my mom to finally take me to the hospital, where I was admitted into urgent care. My lungs were filled with fluid and I had a terrible case of pneumonia. I had to get numerous tests done and even had to stay the night while my condition stabilized. The bills from the hospital were – as predicted – outrageously high, but my mom was happy that I was able to come home. The doctors said that if I had waited even a day longer, I probably wouldn’t have made it.
Although the insurance market should offer more attainable health insurance for everyone, with the healthcare reform act insurance companies have increased their rates to levels that many people cannot even pay. However, because the government is requiring people to get insurance and keep insurance from year to year, they have no other choice but continue to pay insurance premiums to at least have the bare minimum coverage as required to prevent being subjected to penalties (Health Reform Database: Explanation of
It 's called universal health care, and it 's a system followed by nearly every modern nation in the world and even some not-so-modern nations. In America the practice medicine is pretty awful, the health care system is very corrupt system, the politicians get richer (including Hilary Clinton), and the American people (middle class and poor) get the worst of it. You see a young mother who was diagnosed with cancer and she has to travel to Canada to get the medicine that she needs; she has to lie to get her medicine once she is in Canada, but she is willing to do it instead of continue to be denied here in the U.S. If I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in the early or late 1990’s; I definitely would not receive health care coverage or my co-pay and the cost of my MS medicine would have sky
Last November I fought with many, employees, at Martin Luther King Hospital with my son of only six months burning up with a fever of 105 degrees Fahrenheit in my arms. Each minute wasted by Doctors, Nurses, and security all who could have saved my son’s life.The doctors told me they could not provide the care my son needed in order to survive, for one reason, because, my insurance was not approved. As my son started to seize in my very arms the doctors and nurses still could not do anything for me, or my son, they told me he needed an antibiotic immediately. I stormed out of that Hospital and had to transfer my son by myself to another hospital. I definitely learned how flawed American healthcare was that day.
The US healthcare system is focused on a mixed insurance system with both private and public insurance institution. The health insurance system also relies heavily on employment. It depends heavily on corporations and employees to be key sponsors for insurance. This has led to many companies going bust as they are unable to sustain the amount of funds required just to keep their employee’s insurance policies going. Insurance has become so profitable that there are more than a thousand private companies that want to share this very profitable business. These companies are also not regulated on a country level. The profit-targeting companies have also come up with many overlapping and unnecessary policies to fully utilize the loophole in the American healthcare system. These are all in addition to the public insurance policies such as Medicare: covers elders, disable and end stage renal diseases, and Medicaid: children, war veterans and self-employees. As of 2015, 15% of the population is without insurance; one of the major reason is due to the people not having sufficient knowledge on their eligibility.
Our healthcare system has developed into a burden for most people and has terrible consequences for others. It consists of everyone paying for healthcare as a whole, instead of people paying for themselves. This system of healthcare has burdened the people who take care of themselves and have money, but extends the life of people who do not take care of themselves and live in poverty. This is not pleasant for the one’s who decided to go to school and make well over minimum wage. In turn, they are the individuals who end up paying for the people who decided to make bad decisions in their life that put them in the minimum wage position. Clearly, laws regulate the insurance companies but these regulations do not make any sense to many. Balko explains that, “More and m...
It is hard to imagine life without health insurance. If you have any type of medical problem that requires attention, and you have appropriate health care insurance, you can be cared for in the finest of private hospitals. You can get great treatment and your ailments, depending on the severity, can be treated as soon as possible. Doctors, physicians and surgeons are willing to put out a big effort if they know that they are dealing with patients who are insured and have the money to go under extensive medical treatment. But imagine life without such luxuries. For example, what happens if a relative requires much needed surgery, but does not have health insurance to cover the procedure? What happens if a lack of medical insurance prevents you or your family from seeing a doctor, which could result in health problems that had not been identified but could have been treated before they became life threatening? These scenarios may seem far-fetched, but these types of situations happen to people who lack health coverage everyday. There is a true story about a patient who was insured and diagnosed with treatable cervical cancer. Unfortunately, she lost her job and with it her insurance. She was then unable to see her private doctor, and was turned away from other hospitals because ?cancer treatment is not considered an emergency in a patient who can?t pay? (?Help for D.C.?s Uninsured?). The woman later died at her home without ever being treated. This example raises the question, since when are people with less money less deserving of health care or appropriate treatment?