Why don’t we have national healthcare?

Why don’t we have national healthcare?

I want to set the scene for you, its summer time, and it is your first trip going to Canada. So you plan a trip to Windsor, I know maybe not the most exciting destination you could have picked, but bear with me. So you do a little sightseeing, cash in your plain American money for some cool Canadian money, and do some shopping at the local shops. To cap it all off you go to this really cool restaurant called The Twisted Apron. As you take in the ambiance of the restaurant your waitress comes over to take your order and since it isn’t very busy you strike up a conversation. Eventually you get on the subject of healthcare and you ask her what she thinks of her national healthcare system. Her response is that she really likes the system that she has. Now I used this story to ask the question: if this waitress likes her healthcare system, and a majority of world has a national healthcare system, then why doesn’t the US and why is ours so expensive?

From our lecture in class on Monday we learned that a universal healthcare system is the norm for the majority of the world, and our healthcare system is the exception. In addition, the amount spent per capita is more here in the United States than in other developed nations and our outcomes are worse than other peer nations. My opinion on why we have poorer outcomes and greater cost is that healthcare has ballooned into this giant, cogwheel, bureaucratic machine. We are a nation of specialists, and high tech procedures. We have become very proficient at treating patients after they have had a heart attack, but not preventing them in the first place, or teaching patients how to take charge of their own health. However, this “machine” is moving toward a prevention based approach, and I think that in the future our outcomes may be more on par with the rest of the world.

In terms of national healthcare I think that we will eventually have this in the US. It will just take a long time and a lot of political motivation because of the fact that healthcare has become such a political debate. I also think this could be a possible way to dampen the ever increasing costs of healthcare. With a national healthcare system you have a large organization that can bargain, and bargaining is what can drive down costs. Finally, healthcare is a complex machine, and like any machine it is not fixed overnight.