The Benefits Of Socialized Medicine

The United States is the only remaining industrialized nation without some form of universal access to medical services (Light, 2002). As an industrialized nation, it is shameful to see so many people suffer on various levels due to inadequate access to appropriate health care (Rashford, 2007). Research will show that with equal access to healthcare for everyone in the United States, there would be much more preventative care and therefore the cost for treating chronic diseases could be greatly reduced. The New England Journal of Medicine states that they believe a requirement, in the United States, is broad access to wisely designed programs of health promotion, in which the concept of health promotion is expanded to include a goal of cost reduction. This expanded concept directly addresses the challenge of preventing illness as well as that of reducing health care costs (New England Journal of Medicine, 1993). Did you know that preventable illness makes up for approximately 70% of the burden of illness and the associated costs (New England Journal of Medicine, 1993). Many Americans feel that universal health care is not a role that the government should be involved in however; Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs have been shown to improve health for

The government would be the sole determiner of the number of medical professionals that could work.”( Creech, Mark H. “Universal Health Care Is Unbiblical. ) Is access to health care a human right, or a valued social good, or neither? In 2003 the Institute of Medicine published a report, Insuring America's Health, which contained five principles for evaluating various strategies for health care reform. The first principle, "the most basic and important," was that health care coverage should be universal. The idea that access to health care should be universal, however, has become one of the most hotly debated issues in the ongoing discussion of how to reform the U.S. healthcare system. In Opposing Viewpoints: Universal Health Care, authors explores the

The economics of healthcare is not at all simple. What you put in is certainly not necessarily indicative of what you get out, as shown by the striking discrepancy between what we pay and what we get out of our healthcare system. This is demonstrated further by comparing our system to those of France and Italy, who come in first and second, respectively, in WHO’s international ranking of healthcare systems (“World Health Organization’s Ranking of the World’s Health Systems”). Counter to what many Americans may believe, a number of European nations do not have completely socialized medicine.

Universal Healthcare sounds appealing, but it actually lowers the quality and quantity of healthcare services that are rendered to patients, thus downgrading the healthcare system as a whole.  Not having to pay, with everyone having coverage leads to longer wait times for medical service and many people overusing health care services. Implementation of Universal Healthcare in the United States would lead to a detrimental crippling of the nation’s health system. For those countries that have implemented Universal Healthcare or a system similar to it, all or most aspects of the coverage such as cost and care is generally provided by and tightly controlled by the government, a public-sector committee, or employer-based programs, with most of the funding essentially coming from tax revenues or budget cuts in other areas of spending. This paper will conclude with comparing the US healthcare system to others and how the US has one of the most advanced systems in the world.

Canada’s healthcare system is more accessible than the U.S, because Canada’s healthcare system covers all Canadian citizens as opposed to the U.S. healthcare system which depends on a person’s insurance. The U.S healthcare system is an insurance based system. In 2012, the U.S spent 2.8 trillion on healthcare (). Despite such spending on health care, many U.S. residents had no health insurance and several aggregate measures of health quality and outcomes recorded in the USA were poorer than the corresponding data from other high-income countries. In the U.S. if a citizen does not have insurance they will have to pay out of pocket for normal health care services. These out of pocket costs are usually extremely high. To put it in perspective, 18% of U.S citizens do not have health insurance (Costello,

A national health care system in the United States has been a contentious topic of debate for over a century. Social reformists have been fighting for universal health care for all Americans, while the opposition claims that a “social” heath care system has no place in the ‘Land of the Free’.

All healthcare systems, regardless of funding mechanisms, ration the limited resources of health care to some degree (Petrou & Wolstenholme, 2000). Even setting limits on patient choice is a form of rationing that takes place in almost all countries’ health systems (Lauridsen, Norup & Rossel, 2007). In the United States, health care is rationed according to free market principles while other countries employ other means such as long wait times for non-acute conditions or delays in the

Health care spending in the United States of America as a percentage of the economy has reached astonishing heights, equating to 17.7 percent. This number is shocking when compared to other counties; in Australia health care is 8.9 percent, in United Kingdom 9.4 percent, in Canada 11.2 percent. If the American health care system were to hypothetically become its own economy, it would be the fifth-largest in the world. While these statistics sound troubling, they lead us to look for answers about the problems surrounding our system. The first health insurance company was created in the 1930s to give all American families an equal opportunity for hospital care and eventually led to a nationwide economic and social controversy that erupted in the 1990s and continued to be shaped by the government, insurance companies, doctors, and American citizens. In this paper, I will go in to detail about the various opinions regarding the controversy, the history behind health insurance companies, and the main dilemmas brought out by the health care crisis. Greedy insurance companies combined with high costs of doctor visits and pharmaceutical drugs or the inefficient hospitals all over America can only describe the beginning to this in depth crisis. Recently, the United States health care industry has become know for the outrageous costs of insurance models, developments of various social and health services programs, and the frequent changes in medicinal technology.

Some health care costs may be paid by the patient and some health care costs may be covered by the universal health insurance program. There is perhaps no domain of economic activity that has generated more controversy in the United States than health care. In the advanced capitalist world, the United States is the only country within which the market plays a substantial role in the delivery of health care services; all other countries have one form or another of universal, publicly supported health care policies. In other intance if we differ from what is universal health from socialized heatlh. Some people refer to universal health care as socialized medicine. The term “socialized medicine” is primarily used for only in the United States by those who do not support the idea of universal health care(cite). Given the understanding that outside the US, is a different situation saying that the terms most used are universal health care or public health

In “The American Health Care Paradox”, Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor explore why the American health care system achieves mediocre results, despite spending a higher percentage of its gross domestic product than any other country in the world on health care. They explain that health care is more than just getting medical treatment, but there are social factors that affect a person 's health. The authors claim that more government spending on medical treatments is not the solution to the health care paradox, but we should focus more on social needs that have a greater impact on health. Case studies and interviews with physicians, other health care providers, and social service providers are used to support the authors’ claims. Though the authors do not explicitly state the path they believe the American health care system should follow, they give examples of foreign health care systems and domestic health care projects that may point in the right direction.

The availability of healthcare is an extremely important issue in the United States. There are millions of Americans that are uninsured in the U.S. A high amount of uninsured people are from minority groups such as Hispanics and African-Americans. High deductible payments, the cost of prescription drugs, and lack of health insurance coverage cause many Americans to choose to live without insurance to save money for everyday expenses beside healthcare. Without health insurance, people do not have access to quality healthcare. Most citizens are aware of the issues in the healthcare system, but the disagreement comes when discussing how the best approach on ameliorating the system. Some believe that a more public and universal healthcare system is the best approach. Others believe that America works best through free enterprise and private institutions, and believe health insurance should be more privatized. However, health care has been shown to work best and be more available through proper public government control as it will allow for all Americans to have access to equal healthcare, in which money does not dictate health.

The lucrative healthcare companies in America have created an immeasurable gap between good healthcare only being for the privileged upper class Americans which has left a horrible effect on the middle and lower class Americans. As modern medicine achieves new heights, the prices of healthcare seem to tread right behind maintaining an unbroken pattern that American classes have grown accustomed to over the past few decades of paying more for less. Leaving many Americans uninsured, underinsured, or even in debt. In a speech Bernie Sanders a U.S. Senator from Vermont spoke at a presidential campaign October of 2015 which he discussed the unruly problematic healthcare trend of price gouging, that is the medical industry getting the most it can from American citizens. In a blog Bernie Sanders states that “46 million Americans today have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments” (Sanders). 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they cannot cover the cost and don’t go to the doctor when they should. Sanders summed this situation up with this “Health Care is a Right, Not a Privilege” (Sanders). After researching the issue of healthcare, I have come to the conclusion that the American healthcare system is disintegrating due to the ravenousness of modern medical industries, first I will discuss a few reasons to why the healthcare system is failing the modern American

Imagine a nation where one did not have to worry about deductibles, high monthly insurance rates, and being denied health care. Is this possible? Can the United States (U.S.) have this or is such a nation fiction? Michael Moore, known documentary filmmaker, set out on a mission. This mission was featured in his documentary, Sicko. The mission consisted of multiple rhetorical strategies to disclose the positive and negative effects of socialized health care. The great thing about this topic is that it’s applicable to a wide audience. From teenagers just starting to get health insurance, to people midway through their life that may have been burned by the industry, to seniors that need to still work in their eighties to pay off their health care bills. Moore gives good insight to both sides of the argument, and allows the audience to examine all factors. Through many accounts of Moore’s credibility, emotional connections, and pure facts; the audience is strongly convinced that the U.S. should move to a socialized health care system.

It is a patchwork of loosely connected financing mechanisms varying in terms of sponsorship and provider type. It also reflects the age, health and economic status of the specific patient groups that are being served. Considering the growing number of Americans who are uninsured for health care and the low ranking of the United States among a variety of health indicators, one may say that it is a disappointing financing system. These observations provide a basis for supporting our position for a national health care system. Where possible, comparisons will be drawn between the United States and other countries. Special focus will be paid to similarities in the public and private financing components of the system, reimbursement of various provider categories and trends that we may expect to see in the future.

As a matter of fact Wise and Yashiro, 2006 assert that there some individuals who describe the America’s system as being fragmented and inefficient, considering the staggering statistics regarding how Americans spend more on health care compared to other countries in the world. Additionally, they suffer from massive insurance costs and uneven quality of care, and thus understanding the debate about the two diametrically opposed viewpoints requires an in-depth understanding of the current health care issues in the United States (Rashidian, Joudaki, Vian, & Baradaran, 2012).