American Health Care Essay Example For Students

American Health Care Essay 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. The movement for changing the Health Care system believes that there is a need for change because of the problems that the system faces today cannot be handled. Every month, 2 million Americans lose their insurance. One out of four, 63 million Americans, will lose their health insurance covera ge for some period during the next two years . 37 million Americans have no insurance and another 22 million have inadequate coverage . Losing or changing a job often means losing insurance. Becoming ill or living with a chronic medical condition can mean losing insurance coverage or not being able to obtain it. Long-term care coverage is inadequate. Many elderly and disabled Americans enter nursing homes and other institutions when they would prefer to remain at home. Families exhaust their savings trying to provide for disabled relatives. Many Americans in inner cities and rural areas do not have access to quality care, due to poor distribution of doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics and support services. Public health services are not well integrated and coordinated with the personal care delivery system. Many serious health problems such as lead poisoning and drug-resistant tuberculosis are handled inefficiently or not at all, and thus potentially threaten the health of the ent ire population. Rising health costs mean lower wages, higher prices for goods and services, and higher taxes. The average worker today would be earning at least $1,000 more a year if health insurance costs had not risen faster than wages over the previous 15 years . If the cost of health care continues at the current pace, wages will be held down by an additional $650 by the year 2000. More and more Americans have had to give up insurance altogether because the premiums have become prohibitively expensive. Many small firms either cannot afford insurance at all in the current system, or have had to cut benefits or profits in order to provide insurance to their employees. Those problems are just with the system, the main part of the problem comes from the insurance agencies. Quality care means promoting good health. Yet, the agencies waits until people are sick before they starts to work. The agencies are biased towards specialty care and gives inadequate attentions to cost-effective primary and preventive care. Consumers cannot compare doctors and hospitals because reliable quality information is not available to them. Health care providers often dont have enough information on which treatments work best and are most cost-effective. Health care treatment patterns vary widely without detectable effects on health status. Some insurers now compete to insure the healthy and avoid the sick by determining insurability profiles while they should compete on quality, value, and service. The average doctors office spends 80 hours a month pushing paper. Nurses often have to fill out as many as 19 forms to account for one persons hospital stay. This is time that could be better spent caring for patients. Insurance company red tape has created a nightmare for providers, with mountains of forms and numerous levels of review that wastes money and does nothing to improve the quality of care. America has the best doctors who can provide the most advanced treatments in the world . Yet people often cant get treated when they need care. The medical malpractice system does little to promote quality. Fear of litigation forces providers to practice defensive medicine, ordering inappropriate tests and procedures to protect against lawsuits. Truly negligent providers often are not disciplined, and many victims of real malpractice are not compensated for their injuries. Purchasing insurance can be overwhelming for consumers. With different levels of benefits, co-payments, deductibles and a variety of limitations, trying to compare policies is confusing and objective information on quality and service is hard for consumers to find. As a result, consumers are vulnerable to unfair and abusive practices. Insurers have responded to rising health costs by imposing restriction on what doctors and hospitals do. A system that was complicated to begin with has become incomprehensible, even to experts. Each health insurance plan includes different exclusions and limitations. Even the terms used in health policies do not have standard definitions. Small business owners, who cannot afford big benefits departments, have to spend time and money working through the insurance maze. For firms with fewer than five workers, 40 percent of health care premiums go to pay administrative expenses. Administrative costs add to the cost of each hospital stay with the number of health care administrators increasing four times faster than the number of doctors. Health claim forms and the related paperwork are confusing for consumers, and time-consuming to fill out. Insurance coverage for most Americans is not a matter of choice at all. In most cases, they are limited to whatever policy their employer offers. Only 29% of companies with fewer than 500 employees offer any choice of plans. With a growing number of insurers using exclusions for pre-existing conditions, arbitrary cancellations and hidden benefit limitations, consumers have few choices for affordable policies th at provide real protection. Culture and Arts EssayThe details of the Republican plan are as followed. All essential care would be incorporated into the plan, including: mental health, acute care, ambulatory care, long term care and home health care, prescription drugs and medical supplies, rehabilitation services, occupational therapy, and preventive medicine. Exclusions would be made for unnecessary and ineffective procedures. These exclusions would be determined by expert panels, most probably made of doctors, nurses, other health care workers, and health planners. Everyone in the U.S. would receive a national health care plan card, with necessary identification encoded on it. The card can then be used to gain access to any fee-for-service practitioner, hospital or clinic. HMO members can receive non-emergency care through the HMO. As mentioned before, to implement the national health program, health care costs do not need to increase. It would however produce a major shift in payment toward government and away from private insurers and out-of-pocket payments. Individuals and businesses would pay the same amount for health care, on average, but the payments would be in the form of taxes. The taxes contributing to the plan can be found for businesses, for instance, by adding up the amount spent currently by business for health care. This would approximately add up to a 9% tax increase for midsize and large employers . Hospitals and clinics would receive a global sum on a yearly basis, in addition to allowances for new technology. Funds would be distributed to physicians and other health care workers in one of three ways: through fee-for-service arrangements with a simplified billing schedule, through capitation, paying health care providers on the basis of how many patients they serve, or through global budgets established for hospitals and clinics employing salaried health care professionals. The debate stands now between letting the states run health care or continuing control by the federal government. Both make valid points as to why they are the way to go, but my stance after careful thought is one of compromise. Let the federal government standardize health care while the state governments fund it on a state to state level. With a national standard to follow prices would be forced to keep the same through out America. Procedures for problems would not be questioned. Finally there will be less paperwork. Making the state governments fund their own health care system at first lance seems to be cost inefficient. At another look and a explanation I can dispute that. With the government in total control it had one big pile of money it had to divide to all the states and no real way to determine how to divide it. With the individual states involved in funding health care, they know the size of their population, who needs care in their population and can do a more efficient job on a smaller scale. Also by letting the governments on the state level run everything t he problem of the government giving to little to states that need funding and to much to states that don’t need it will not occur. Unfortunately due to the way the government handles major changes health care reform will most likely be debated for another ten years. The way the debate is moving it seems to be heading towards the state controlled health care, but there doesn’t appear to be enough power behind the movement to get it approved. The dream of universal coverage s it a dream or is it a near future for all Americans, only with patience by the people will they find out. Social Issues