(D.J.) Dylan Lintelman(FGCU): Health Care Crisis

Right now, in the United States, someone is afraid to go to the doctor.

They’re not afraid because of the pain, or because they dont know whats wrong with them…they’re afraid of the inability to pay for the service.

The United States currently has a fee-for-service system where people are privately insured by companies and pay a copayment along with their provider in order to cover the medical costs.  It is however an extremely flawed system. Health care insurance costs have increased by double digit percentages and perscription costs have skyrocketed in the past few years.  A growing number of people seek insurance coverage through employers and thus if they lose their job then they are out of health insurance.  I personally think that the health care crisis is directly linked to the economic crisis going on right now.  People are afraid of rising medical costs and therefore consumers are spending less on buying things and saving more.  This is partially why the economy is in a downward spiral.  With recessive spending habits because of health care costs, consumers are causing major retailers such as Circuit City and Linens and Things to go out of business. With over 47 Million Americans uninsured, 8 Million of those being children, we need to find a solution to this problem and we need to find one now.  We’ve been putting off this problem for some time now, and now that our nation begins to surpass the 300,000,000 population mark, we cannot afford to put off this problem any longer.

        The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world to not use the Universal Health care system.  Consequently, the United States is ranked by the World Health Organization as 37th in both life expectancy and infant mortalities.  Uninsured Americans are less likely to use regular health care and have preventive services.  A form of universal health care would undoubtedly prove successfull in modern day American society.  Everyone would be insured and government spending would be cut because they wouldnt have to subsidize so many health care provider companies. 

Because of rising health care costs, many small businesses have dropped health insurance for their employees all together or are asking them to contribute to their insurance premiums, which many employees cannot afford to do. And, as we have seen with the laid-off workers, when employees lose their jobs they often lose their health insurance. This cannot happen anywhere else in the industrialized world, even though unemployment is rising in Canada and Europe. Every other industrialized country has some form of universal health care. None uses profit making, investor-owned insurance companies like ours to provide health care for their citizens.  In Canada, a country where universal health care is in full effect, 83.6% of their citizens are extremely satisfied with their health care service, as opposed to 96.3% of Americans being satisfied with their service, obviously barring the bills they have to pay after the service. 

      Opponents of universal health care are mainly Republicans who view health care as a personal problem.  To some extent it is true that people need to be fiscally responsible for themelves, but in the end if we dont switch to a form of universal health care, even the wealthy are in trouble.  Those Republicans, who are mostly business owners or wealth individuals with a high income that ties in someway with the economy, dont realize that their customers are not likely to spend money if they dont have money because of increased medical bills.  People dont want to spend their money and those companies will ultimately suffer.  Many Americans want lower taxes but more services.  This is called the tax service paradox.  Soon enough someone is going to dial 911 and no one will pick up the phone!

  Their are other alternatives instead of swithcing to complete universal health care, such as single-payer systems where citizens draw money from a single fund in order to pay health care expenses.  Medicare is an example of a single payer health care system.  Advocates of single payer health systems in America call their plan Medicare-For-All

Canada’s system is an example of single-payer health care. The national government provides part of the funding, provincial governments manage the hospitals (and provide the brunt of the funding), and doctors in private practice contract with the government for fee-for-service payments. Many Canadian citizens have supplemental health insurance, which covers expenses not covered by Canadian Medicare. Fees for doctors, hospitals and other providers are set by negotiations among doctors’ associations, provincial or regional governments, and the national government. Global budgets eliminate the cost of billing individually for huge numbers of products and services.  The provision of health care in Canada is done mostly via private practitioners, although most hospitals are public. Patients may go to any doctor or hospital in the country.

 Lack of universal health care is often cited as one America’s leading domestic concerns, yet states and the federal government have failed to enact long-lasting, viable solutions for reform and the United States remains the only industrialized country that does not guarantee health coverage to all its citizens.

President Barack Obama hopes to help improve the problems with out health care system that past administrations have put off for so long.  I dont know how we are going to solve the problem or who will solve it but hopefully we will have a time where all citizens of this country are covered and have health care and no one is afraid to go to the doctor because of a broken arm that could cost them upwards of $10,000 out of pocket.

Here are a few statistics that put the crisis in sharp relief:

FACT: One-third of adults (31 percent) and more than half of all children (54 percent) do not have a primary care doctor (National Medical Expenditure Panel Survey)

FACT: 46.6 million Americans, (15.9 percent of Americans — about twice the population of Texas) were uninsured in 2005. (U.S. Census - August 2006)

FACT: More than two-thirds of uninsured adults in the United States, worked in 2005. In other words, 39.8 million workers, who had no health care — more than the population of Canada.

FACT: Federal spending for health care totaled more than $600 billion in 2005, or roughly one quarter of the federal budget. (U.S. Office of Management and Budget)

FACT: The total medical expenditures for full- and part-year uninsured in 2004 came to nearly $124 billion — more than the combined appropriations in 2004 for Iraq and the anti-terror programs.

FACT: Of 23 industrialized countries, the United States had the highest infant mortality rates. U.S. rates were similar to those of Poland and Hungary. (OECD, Commonwealth Fund Scorecard, 2006)

FACT: The United States ranked among the bottom of industrialized countries on healthy life expectancy at age 60 — meaning Americans spend more years lived in poor health resulting from chronic illness or disability. (OECD, Commonwealth Fund: Results from a Scorecard, 2006)

FACT: Barely half — about 49 percent — of adults receive recommended preventive care and screening tests according to guidelines for their age and sex. (Commonwealth Fund Scorecard 2006)

FACT: Close to 100,000 Americans die annually from medical errors — more than double the number of Americans who die annually in car crashes (Institute of Medicine).

This entry was posted on 29. January 2009 at 20:26 and is filed under Introduction to Sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.