The Health Care System Essays - Health Economics,

The Health Care System More Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine have been won by doctors or scientists working in the United States than the rest of the world. It is widely accepted that the best training and education is available in the United States in the field of medicine. Despite the fact that over $750 billion is spent on health care in the United States, more than 30 million Americans have no medical coverage and over 100 million are reportedly underinsured according to Nancy Watzman, of the Washington Monthly. We spend 14 percent of our Gross National Product (GNP) on health care each year, while our neighbors to the north, the Canadians, spend only nine percent of their GNP on the same but cover 100 percent of their citizens. If the Canadians can manage to cover every one of their citizens, then we, ?The People?, must find a way to do the same. We have one of two options; either we can spend billions of dollars inventing a new health care system for the United States, or we can be frugal and efficient by adopting the Canadian model of national health care and merely customizing it to fit our own needs. And, although critics may decry the prudence of implementing a system based on socialized medicine, there would be minimal to no sacrifice in coverage, cost, and quality of health care as compared to what little health coverage we have today. If we model our system after the Canadians' then this would mean all people share the same waiting rooms, the same doctors, the same equipment, and receive the same medical care. This also alleviates the problem of some Americans receiving the best medical attention available in the world while others receive miserable attention or none at all. This idea of universal coverage sounds wonderful if you have no medical insurance currently, but it is unthinkable if you are accustomed to private rooms in hospitals and hospital meals prepared by gourmet chefs. But if this is what you are accustomed to, you belong to a small minority of Americans. Only ten percent of Americans approve of our ?health care system?, while 56 percent of Canadians approve of theirs (Goodman 35). Perhaps the disgruntled 90 percent majority could also vote the right people into congress to change the health care system to provide universal coverage here in the United States. We could not only provide universal coverage, but we could cover everyone at a lower cost for health care than we are currently paying. It actually costs less to supply medical coverage for the average Canadian than it does for the average American. A Canadian who earns the equivalent of $26,000 US dollars pays about $1,300 a year for medical coverage, while an American earning the same amount pays $2,500 per year according to Mark Kelly of the Chicago Tribune. And it's not only the citizens who would save money. The General Accounting Office estimates conservatively that at least $68 billion could be saved in paperwork costs alone if the United States switched to a national health plan. That amount itself would be enough to pay for all the uninsured citizens in the United States with some money left over for lollipops for the kids. It may be argued that these cost savings will come at the price of quality of patient care, but that is just another myth propagated by the American Medical Association, which is easily debunked by facts. If we take the $68 billion in administrative savings and subtract the estimated $12 billion it would cost to extend the same quality of care for the uninsured as the currently insured are receiving, we are left with $56 billion to do with as we wish. Furthermore, how can we even begin to talk about a decline in patient care when the numbers of the uninsured are so staggering? If over 130 million U.S. citizens, or over half of the United States' population, are currently uninsured or underinsured and we provide them some kind of medical coverage, this in itself is a significant improvement in quality of care for these people. The fault lies with the doctors who are used to providing state of the art care for the economically advantaged