Why are Americans so worked up about health care reform? Statements such as “don’t touch my Medicare” or “everyone must have access to state of the art health care irrespective of cost” are in my opinion uninformed and visceral responses that indicate an unhealthy understanding of our health and wellness care system’s history, its current and future resources and the funding challenges that America faces going forward. 私密處保養推薦 While we all wonder how the health care system has already reached what some refer to as a crisis stage . Let’s try to take a number of the emotion out of the debate by briefly examining how healthcare in this country emerged and how that has formed our thinking and culture about healthcare. With that as a foundation let’s consider the advantages and disadvantages of the Obama administration healthcare reform proposals and let’s look at the concepts help with by the Republicans?
Access to state of the art health care services is something we are able to all agree would be a good thing for this country. Experiencing a significant illness is one of life’s major challenges and to face it without the methods to pay for it is positively frightening. But once we shall see, once we know the facts, we shall find that achieving this goal will never be easy without our individual contribution.
These are the themes I’ll touch on to try to make some sense out of what is happening to American healthcare and the steps we are able to personally take to make things better.
A recent history of American health care – what has driven the costs so high?
Key elements of the Obama health care plan
The Republican view of healthcare – free market competition
Universal access to state of the art health care – a worthy goal but not easy to achieve
what can we do?
First, let’s get yourself a little historical perspective on American health care. This is not intended to be an exhausted look into that history but it will give us an appreciation of how the healthcare system and our expectations for it developed. What drove costs higher and higher?
To begin with, let’s turn to the American civil war. In that war, dated tactics and the carnage inflicted by modern weapons of the era combined to cause ghastly results. Not generally known is that a lot of the deaths on both sides of this war were not the result of actual combat but to what happened following a battlefield wound was inflicted. To begin with, evacuation of the wounded moved at a snail’s pace and this caused severe delays in treating the wounded. Secondly, many wounds were put through wound care, related surgeries and/or amputations of the affected limbs which often resulted in the onset of massive infection. So you might survive a battle wound only to die as a result of health care providers who although well-intentioned, their interventions were often quite lethal. High death tolls can also be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases in a period when no antibiotics existed. Altogether something like 600,000 deaths occurred from all causes, over 2% of the U.S. population at that time!
Let’s skip to the first 1 / 2 of the 20th century for some additional perspective also to bring us up to newer times. After the civil war there have been steady improvements in American medicine in both understanding and treatment of certain diseases, new surgical techniques and in physician education and training. But also for the most part the very best that doctors can offer their patients was a “wait and see” approach. Medicine could handle bone fractures and increasingly attempt risky surgeries (now largely performed in sterile surgical environments) but medicines were not yet available to handle serious illnesses. The majority of deaths remained the consequence of untreatable conditions such as for example tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever and measles and/or related complications. Doctors were increasingly aware of heart and vascular conditions, and cancer but they had almost nothing with which to treat these conditions.