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Healthcare And The United States Healthcare

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The United States (US) healthcare has seen tremendous shifts and turns in its existence. From the beginning, American healthcare’s focus is to provide quality and safe health care to the people. On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law prompting another colossal change in healthcare in the US (Moses et al., 2013; Pipes, 2010; Rice et al., 2014). The policy soon took on the more commonly known name of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA brought forth the biggest growth in healthcare coverage in the US since 1965 and resulted in the reorganization of 20 % of the US economy (Pipes, 2010). The ACA’s primary goal is to expand the number of individuals covered by health insurance and decrease the general cost of health care in the country (Gonzales & Stuart, 2014; Moses et al., 2013; Rice et al., 2014). This paper will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the United States healthcare and compare it to the reformed Dutch healthcare system.
Dutch Healthcare
The Dutch have a strong history of functioning within a free market economy (Perrott, 2008). The Dutch entrepreneurial spirit has been deeply rooted in their culture since 1621 when the Dutch West India Company was commissioned. The Dutch health care system was mainly a government-funded model with few free market assets. Before the Dutch health care reform, Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century proposed the Dutch health care model to have it origins in the social

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