...spend significantly more on health care than any country in the world; however, even though with this statistic the United States has a lot of uninsured and does not have the healthiest citizens. The lack of universal healthcare coverage in the United States has been a forefront issue. With the overwhelming amount of uninsured Americans and the past unsuccessful efforts of health care reform, the possibility of universal health care seemed to be very unlikely. The new healthcare reform bill that was recently passed under Obama’s administration anticipates covering 30 more million of the uninsured (Riegelman, 2010). However, this bill does not offer universal healthcare. While excellent medical care is available in the United States, the rising cost and the U.S. health care delivery system present many challenges for the consumer and lawmakers. This paper addresses four dimensions that are pivotal to the successes and failures of the system: cost, efficiency, quality. The cost of the U.S. health care system is higher than any country in the world. Its efficiency is also under heavy scrutiny. If it were not an emergency most physicians would require insurance verification. Therefore, patients would be delayed of treatment. Moreover, The healthcare system in the U.S. should be redesigned in terms of prevention rather than treatment when people are already sick. Insurance should not go higher for people that have pre-existing conditions or with more health risks. Prevention and portability...
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...Full draft The United States spends 17.6 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare each year (Kane, 2012), this amounts to 17.6 cents of every U.S. dollar. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an economic group comprised of 34 member nations including the United States. The OECD average is between 6 and 8 percent GDP spent on healthcare. Among OECD nations the U.S. scores below average in almost all areas of healthcare, despite spending 2 ½ times more of its economy on the health industry.There are many reasons for this and just as many proposed solutions. I will address three potential solutions here. These are price variations for services, bureaucratic waste, and prescription oversite. Price variation is a substantial part of why healthcare costs so much in the United States. Prices for the same procedure vary by hospital, region, provider and insurer. For the first example, we will look at the cost of a lower joint replacement. According to a Washington Post article (Kliff and Keating, Ye2013r) the price in Virginia varies from $25,000 to $117,000. While in Texas, two hospitals that are 5 miles apart range from $42,632 to $160,832. The second example comes from two hospitals in New York City, which have a price variation of 321% for treating complicated cases of asthma and bronchitis. The difference is $34,310 compared to $8,159. (Kliff and Keating, Ye2013r) Other countries have developed a set fee schedule to address...
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...Questioning Assumptions about Health Care Systems Executive Summary The United States Health care system is the subject of much debate. At one extreme are those who argue that Americans have the best healthcare system in the world, pointing to the freely available medical technology and state-of-the-art facilities that have become so symbolic of our system. At the other extreme are those who accuse our system of being fragmented and inefficient, pointing to the fact that the U.S. spends more on health care than any other country in the world, yet still suffers from a substantial rate of uninsured, uneven quality, and administrative waste (Sultz, 2013). A review of U.S. healthcare expenses by the Institute of Medicine revealed that thirty cents of every dollar spent on medical care is wasted, adding up to $750 billion annually (http://www.iom.edu, 2012). The Institute of Medicine report identifies six major areas of medical waste: unnecessary services; inefficient delivery of care; excess administrative costs; inflated prices; prevention failures; and fraud (http://www.iom.edu, 2012). Americans spend twice as much on health care per capita than any other country in the world. In fact, according to a series of studies by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co, the US spends more on health care than the next ten biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia (http://www.mckinsey.com, 2008) Introduction ...
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...Policy Analysis Paper The fate of uninsured Veterans: A policy Analysis University of Mississippi Medical Center School of Nursing Define the problem and assemble the evidence Too many Veterans in the United States lack health insurance and are ineligible to receive care provided by the Veteran’s Health Administration. According to American Community Survey (ACS) conducted in 2010, one in 10 of the nation’s 12.5 million veterans under the age of 65 is uninsured. A veteran is defined by federal law as any person who served for any length of time in any military service branch. Contrary to the presumption of most, not all veterans qualify for free healthcare through the Department of Veteran Affairs. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) operates as a branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs and is the largest health system in the nation. It is recognized for its commitment to providing high-quality population specific healthcare. The VHA also works closely with academic medical centers across the nation. Haley and Kenney (2012) identify eligibility for health care provided by the VHA as being on veteran status, service-connected disabilities and income level. Other factors include demographic location and cost sharing requirements. Health insurance coverage for veterans as with other groups of nonelderly adults has heavy dependence on access to employer sponsored insurance (ESI) and the costs of obtaining it. It must also be considered that the majority of states...
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...the cost of health care has left many Americans struggling to pay their medical bills. Workers are complaining they are not able to afford the high premiums for health insurance. Many employers are cutting back as well as doing away with health benefits, which are causing millions of more people to be in the uninsured position. With programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, the federal government and state are lacking to meet the increasing costs. In the United States, the health care costs are a lot higher than other advanced nation. According to The Common Wealth Fund, the number of uninsured went from “39.8 million to 43.6 million,” a 9.5 percent jump, from the year 2000 to 2002. (Davis, 2004) “Rising health care costs are a problem for all Americans, but they weigh especially heavily on uninsured and “underinsured” individuals, who pay much of the cost of their health care directly out-of-pocket.” (The Common Wealth Fund, 2004) The higher the costs are to patients, will result in the underuse of suitable care and cause a great financial burden on the sick. After some thoroughly research, I have found that the Single-Payer Health System is the way for the future in the United States. We are no longer able to afford and/or tolerate careless spending on care that is not beneficial to patients or the repeat of over costly and unnecessary procedures. Below is a chart from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, showing the number of persons without health insurance...
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... Conservatives and Health Care 18,000 people die in the United Staes each year because they are uninsured. These people were not only denied a chance to live, but denied the right to have proper health care. This denial is a direct cause of the vast controversies over health care by liberals and conservatives. Liberals and conservatives are on two different sides of a broad hemisphere of philosophies that run rampant in The U.Ss’ government, especially on the view of health care. The recession has made the gap between these two margins more vast than ever before. Liberals on the far left of the spectrum believe that health care should be provided to all Americans regardless of their income. They assert that a universal health care system or even single-payer system would be the best form of health care to put in place. Now that health care has become increasingly unaffordable for many families and businesses, the turn towards a universal or single-payer plan could be the right move. Conservatives on the other side of the spectrum, the far right, tend to lean towards the government having minimum involvement in providing health care for the public. They believe health care should be privatized and based on a free market. By increasing competition and trying to keep insurance companies honest, conservatives claim health care system would be fixed. This idea is clearly inconsistent because many people in the US cannot afford to pay for privatized health insurance. Many conservatives...
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...The Paradox in the Affordable Care Act Submitted By: Vodney Wynn vewynn@aol.com October 12, 2014 PA582_CourseProject Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………3 The History of Healthcare Reform……………………………………………………………………………..…4 The Problem with the ACA……………………………………………………………………………………………6 The Current Policy………………………………………………………………………………………………………..8 Policy Alternatives………………………………………………………………………………………………………10 Evaluation Criteria………………………………………………………………………………………………………10 Policy Recommendation……………………………………………………………………………………………..12 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..13 References………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….14 Introduction Recent health care reform legislation, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Education Reconciliation Act, which is now being referred to simply as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010. Since the 20th century, several United States presidents have faced challenges in passing national health reform into law. Before the ACA was enacted, national health reform proposals under different governments in the United States faced strong opposition from various stakeholders and multiple interest groups. Therefore, the enactment of the ACA is revolutionary healthcare reform in the history of the United States. Healthcare insurance is a program that assists in paying medical expenses through privately purchased insurance...
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...The debate over health care has raged since the conception of the program. The single payer system, widely used by European countries, is considered one of the most effective universal health care systems ever created. The United States currently uses a system that almost universally puts the health care institution in the hands of corporations and private entities. This makes receiving health care as a less wealthy person extremely difficult and expensive. There is an easier way to help the general public with this issue. The right to health care must be practiced in order to save more lives, spend less on health care as a country, and to have a more ethical and pragmatic society. Many Americans are unaware of what a single payer health care system can do for them and are even more uneducated about what the system actually is. Single payer national health insurance, also known as “Medicare for all”, is a system in which a single public institution organizes the financial aspect of health care. The actual services would still be provided by private entities. Under this system, all residents of the United States of America would be covered for all medically necessary services, including doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs. Americans are concerned with the way this program will be funded; however, there is a simple solution to this social perturbation. The program would...
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...healthcare systems. According to the analysis, it was noted that US has an expensive healthcare system that doubles the Canadian healthcare systems. According to the percapita income expenditure on health report, the U.S spends $6,096 while Canada spends $3,038. On the other hand, other studies that were conducted later after the study was done indicate that the Canadian healthcare systems are better than the U.S healthcare systems. The reviews illustrated that the Canadian healthcare systems give the Canadians better and superior healthcare services as compared to the U.S (Pylypchuk&Sarpong, 2013). Pylypchuk andSarpong (2013) contended that various analysts have found that U.S is one of the countries whose spending on healthcare is big, but suffers the poorest healthcare for its people. Reports show that Canada has longer life expectancy than the US. The report on infant mortality in Canada shows that Canada is better than U.S by a great margin. Although analysts say that the comparative analysis do not give consistent differences between the healthcare systems, U.S is one of the countries that has been spot-lit of the idea of expensive healthcare. The actual reasons for the differences between the Canada and U.S are not yet determined; however, analysis by the World Health Organizations by the ratings of the healthcare in 191 member nations indicate that U.S is 72nd while Canada is 35th. There is need for improving the status of healthcare in the U.S so that citizens...
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...What role does early American history have to play in the quest for Universal Health Coverage in the U.S. during the 20th century? Fiona Nelson-Lafuse ENG122 Emily Fancy 18th February 2013 INTRODUCTION The topic question for this research paper is, “Most developed countries have universal health coverage. Why doesn’t the United States have universal health coverage? There have been repeated attempts by many different legislators over the past 150 years to introduce some form of universal health coverage to this country; and given the successive failures, it seems crucial to investigate early American history to uncover the origins of this steadfast resistance to universal health coverage; and gain an understanding of the impact those early citizens have had from the time of the Constitution on down through subsequent generations in their quest to keep universal health care off the legislative table. Despite the fact that the Constitution does not explicitly provide for universal healthcare, and there has been constant resistance to any attempts to bring it in, during the period 1900 - 1920, it seemed likely universal health coverage would pass into law – then at the last moment it failed. In the period between 1902 and 1965, 19 attempts were made to push universal health care coverage into legislation; and before this paper moves on to examine the role of social, political and commercial interests in these failures, it is important to consider...
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...National Health Insurance -- Setback or Solution? Unless a person has been living under a rock the last few decades, they would be aware the U.S. healthcare system - how it is financed, how it is delivered, and who receives the benefits has been in and out of public consciousness. Why all the attention? According to a policy brief, released by the New America Foundation, “lack of health insurance negatively affects the overall productivity of society, the stability of emergency care, and the health and financial well-being of individuals” ( Carpenter & Axeen, 2008, p. 1). The brief also states that everyone’s cost of care is affected by the uninsured, so therefore to address the cost problem, the uninsured will have to be covered (Carpenter & Axeen, 2008, p. 1). H.R. 676, drafted by Rep. John Conyers, proposes national health insurance (NHI) as a solution which raises many concerns and questions ("Text of H.R. 676 | John Conyers for Congress", n.d., p. 1). Is national health insurance another way of saying ‘socialized medicine’? According to Uew Reinhardt, a respected economist,” socialized medicine refers to health system in which the government owns and operates both the financing of health care and its delivery” (Reinhardt, 2009, p. 1). In contrast, national health insurance is a system in which “…the government pays for care that is delivered in the private (mostly not-for-profit) sector” (Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), 2012, p.1). NHI, as...
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...are more than forty-one million people who are without health insurance. The United States Government actuaries states that the healthcare spending in the U.S. will double by 2015-to-more than 12,300 per person and account for 20 percent of the nations GDP. U.S. healthcare costs have made health insurance too expensive for many employers to offer health insurance. Health coverage alone is taking away more than a quarter of worker’s earnings. Fewer employers are offering health insurance in America. Under President Obama, the current administration firmly believes that comprehensive reform should reduce long-term growth of health care costs for businesses and government, protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of health care costs, guarantee choice of doctors and wellness, improve patient safety and quality of care, assure affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans, maintain coverage when you change or lose your job and end barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions. Not everyone agrees with the Obama administration. However, there has been major controversy with a new President (Obama), regarding how to fix the health insurance crisis in America. Major health care reform proposals have been the following: (1) single payer plans that call for the federal government to impose health insurance taxes and directly administer health benefits for everyone; (2) universal health insurance plans that require employers to pay all or most...
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...Single Payer Health Care System Purpose – The focus of this research is to identify, analyze and evaluate a type of health care system called Single Payer Health Care System by finding answers to the following questions. Health care is one of the basic necessities that a government should provide to its citizens. Single Payer Health Care systems are catered towards the well-being of its citizens that regard people’s health as their main priority. What is a single-payer health care system? Single-payer national health insurance, also known as “Medicare for all,” is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health care financing, but the delivery of care remains largely in private hands. Under a single-payer system, all residents of a country would be covered for all medically necessary services, including doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs. The program would have a single public system of administration, eliminating the present highly expensive multiple, fragmented, and duplicative system operated by different government agencies and private hospitals. The whole operation would be paid by a combination of present Medicare and Medicaid expenditures, existing state and local expenditures for health services, mandated employer contributions, and additional tax revenues equal to the amounts now spent by citizens out of pocket, savings obtained...
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...Health care reform in the United States has a long history. Reforms have often been proposed but have rarely been accomplished. In 2010, landmark reform was passed through two federal statutes enacted in 2010: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), signed March 23, 2010, and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 , which amended the PPACA and became law on March 30, 2010. Future reforms and ideas continue to be proposed, with notable arguments including a single-payer system and a reduction in fee-for-service medical care. The PPACA includes a new agency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is intended to research reform ideas through pilot projects. ------------------------------------------------- History of national reform efforts Here is a summary of reform achievements at the national level in the United States. * 1965 President Lyndon Johnson enacted legislation that introduced Medicare, covering both hospital and general medical insurance for senior citizens paid for by a Federal employment tax over the working life of the retiree, and Medicaid permitted the Federal government to partially fund a program for the poor, with the program managed and co-financed by the individual states. * 1985 The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA) amended the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) to give some employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage after...
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...“Impact of the Health Care Reform on Social Insurance versus Private Insurance” Introduction: Health care cost in the United States continues to spiral out of control. It has become a national crisis for the Unites States government to solve. Medicare, a government health care national program funded by taxpayers is no longer a sufficient funding pool to support the elderly and retirees. In 2012, Medicare program has a growth deficit spending, which totaled $492 billion and expected to hit $895 billion in 2022. Medicare reform was a signature discussion amongst last year presidential candidates. Now we once again asked ourselves the question will healthcare reform work this time? More importantly, should the US government reform existing health care into a social healthcare program, similar to our neighboring country, Canada? Or whether the US government should continue supporting the health care hybrid model: public health care and private health care. Under the public health care, the government continues to subsidies healthcare coverage through Medicare program to the elderly and the retirees. Under the private health care, private corporations continue with employer-based insurance program to provide coverage for the working population? As we know it today the costs of health care continue to soar and the costs are not uniform across the population. With the increasing prevalence of chronic illness amongst the aging population, about 30 percent of the population...
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