Health Care 2
The U.S. spends more money on health care than any other country in the world, yet most Americans do no receive adequate health care. Many factors have contributed to this problem. One major factor is cost. The price of health care has risen tremendously in the previous years and is expected to continue to rise in the years to come. Some reasons for the high cost of health care are technology, administrative costs, unnecessary care, and patient complexity. Technology plays an important role in the increasing health care costs, because it gets more and more expensive as new drugs, procedures and equipment are created. Administrative costs, which include paying physicians, hospital bills, enrollment, marketing, and determining eligibility, also add up to a large sum of money. According to Peter Conrad's The Social Organization of Medical Care, cost administrative costs accounted for about 25% of the $738 billion health care expenditure in 1990, and the estimated savings in administrative costs for some proposed health care reforms is $31 billion to $67 billion. Although it is difficult to define which procedures are necessary and which are not, unnecessary procedures add to the cost of health care. These procedures take aw
There have been quite a few attempts to reform the health care system both comprehensively and incrementally. Early in the Clinton administration, Hilary Clinton propped idea to totally reform the health care system for the entire country. Initially it failed, because the public did not want the government to get involved, but soon the public changed its mind. They went back to the government for help, and laws began to get passes. Slowly change began to happen. Each problem was dealt with separately. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson created Medicare and Medicare to help benefit people who could not afford health insurance. Medicare, created to aid the elderly, and Medicaid, created to aid the poor, both help in a few ways, but in reality neither one covers enough to really benefit these people. I think that the best way to change the problem with health care in the United States is thorough incremental, state-by state change. Each state should for a Health Care Reform Committee whose only goal is to get health care to all those who cannot afford it. One way of doing this would be for the state to conduct a survey. Like the census, this survey must get to every person in the state. In the survey, people would answer questions about their current financial status, their financial history, whether they have insurance or not, what kind of insurance the have etc. From the data collected, the Health Care Reform Committee would examine would meet and discuss the problems and patterns they see from the survey results. The committees must then come up with different ideas for health care reform that meets to needs of their state. Different states have different needs, so each state's committee must come up with a plan that works best for them. After discussing and creating ideas, the committee should implement the plan in which they have decided on. If it looks like the plan is working, they should stick with it, but if not, the committee will have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a better idea. Many people believe that dealing with each problem separately won't work, but some states have already improved the state of their health care system. Hawaii, for example, passed a health care pact in 1974 that was based on employment. As long as people work 20 hours per week, they are entitled to health insurance. They receive a basic package and the employer pays most, if not all, of the premium. In 1984 the plan was extended to part-time workers, seasona
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1678
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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