Healthcare Essay Research Paper The American Health

Healthcare Essay, Research Paper

The American Health Care system has prided itself on providing high quality services tothe citizens who normally cannot afford them. This system has been in place for years and untilnow it did a fairly decent job. The problem today is money; the cost of hospital services anddoctor fees are rising faster than ever before. The government has been trying to come up with anew plan these past few years even though there has been strong opposition against a new HealthCare system. There are many reasons why it should be changed and there are many reasons whyit shouldn t be changed. The main thing that both sides heads towards is money. Both sides wantto save money just in different ways. The movement for changing the Health Care system believe that there is a need for changebecause of the problems that the system faces today cannot be handled. Every month, 2 millionAmericans lose their insurance . One out of four, 63 million Americans, will lose their healthinsurance coverage for some period during the next two years . 37 million Americans have noinsurance and another 22 million have inadequate coverage . Losing or changing a job oftenmeans losing insurance. Becoming ill or living with a chronic medical condition can mean losinginsurance coverage or not being able to obtain it. Long-term care coverage is inadequate. Manyelderly and disabled Americans enter nursing homes and other institutions when they would preferto remain at home. Families exhaust their savings trying to provide for disabled relatives. ManyAmericans in inner cities and rural areas do not have access to quality care, due to poordistribution of doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics and support services. Public health services arenot well integrated and coordinated with the personal care delivery system. Many serious healthproblems — such as lead poisoning and drug-resistant tuberculosis — are handled inefficiently ornot at all, and thus potentially threaten the health of the entire population. Rising health costsmean lower wages, higher prices for goods and services, and higher taxes. The average workertoday would be earning at least $1,000 more a year if health insurance costs had not risen fasterthan 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 2000ii . More and more Americanshave had to give up insurance altogether because the premiums have become prohibitivelyexpensive. Many small firms either cannot afford insurance at all in the current system, or havehad 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 theinsurance agencies. Quality care means promoting good health. Yet, the agencies waits untilpeople are sick before they starts to work. The agencies are biased towards specialty care andgives inadequate attention to cost-effective primary and preventive care. Consumers cannotcompare doctors and hospitals because reliable quality information is not available to them. Health care providers often don’t have enough information on which treatments work best and aremost cost-effective. Health care treatment patterns vary widely without detectable effects onhealth 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 averagedoctor’s office spends 80 hours a month pushing paper. Nurses often have to fill out as many as19 forms to account for one person’s hospital stay. This is time that could be better spent caringfor patients. Insurance company red tape has created a nightmare for providers, with mountains offorms and numerous levels of review that wastes money and does nothing to improve the qualityof care. America has the best doctors who can provide the most advanced treatments in theworld. Yet people often can’t get treated when they need care. The medical malpractice systemdoes little to promote quality. Fear of litigation forces providers to practice defensive medicine,ordering inappropriate tests and procedures to protect against lawsuits. Truly negligent providersoften are not disciplined, and many victims of real malpractice are not compensated for theirinjuries.Purchasing insurance can be overwhelming for consumers. With different levels ofbenefits, co-payments, deductibles and a variety of limitations, trying to compare policies isconfusing and objective information on quality and service is hard for consumers to find. As aresult, consumers are vulnerable to unfair and abusive practices. Insurers have responded torising health costs by imposing restriction on what doctors and hospitals do. A system that wascomplicated to begin with has become incomprehensible, even to experts. Each health insuranceplan includes different exclusions and limitations. Even the terms used in health policies do nothave 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 thanfive 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 careadministrators increasing four times faster than the number of doctors. Health claim forms andthe related paperwor