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.
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