How Do People View The Health Care System? Essay

The readings this week solidified many long standing questions that I’ve had about the healthcare system, and further proved to me just how flawed it is. The introduction and chapter four from The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr established a framework and common language surrounding how the current healthcare system came to be. The introduction specifically heavily focused on the concept of authority and how cultural and societal authority differ and work to strengthen an individual's power. Following this intro, the fourth chapter serves to provide the reader with baseline historical context on how hospitals and physicians have evolved from voluntary institutions into for-profit corporations. Using these chapters as foundational knowledge Gambles chapter gains new nuances to the need for Black hospitals to be established, and the competing forces that were at work to ensure their failure.

Q2-Evaluate Vegemite’s brand image based on the social media research undertaken by Talbot and his team .In light of these historic factors, Why did Talbot want to revitalize the brand?

The U.S. health care system is way more complex than what meets the eye. A major difference between the health care system in the U.S. and other nations, is that the U.S. does not have universal health care. Lack of a universal health care opens up the doors for competition amongst insurance, physicians, technology, hospitals and outpatient services.

“Mama might be better off dead: The failure of healthcare in urban America”, was written by an investigative reporter Laurie Kaye Abraham in 1993. This is a disturbing and profound look at the human side of the health care and how government health care policies work when they hit the streets. This is a story of an impoverished African-American family dealing with devastating illnesses and how they end up in a miserable dilemma.

Health care has been an area of discussion for some time now. In the United States, the current health care system is a private system that allows individuals to choose their own method of care. Despite the freedom that comes with the independent nature of this type of health care system, the true disposition creates more problems than it solves. The privacy of the health care institutions has caused affordability and access to become serious issues with this system. Additionally, those with lower socioeconomic status fall short of the ability to access the same pool of resources as everyone else. Due to the issues with affordability, access, and the poor infrastructure of the health care system, a universal health

In the book “mama might be better off dead” written by Laurie Kaye Abraham, tells a story of Jackie Banes and her family, and their struggles to hold the family’s health together. Her grandmother Mrs. Cora Jackson, who pretty much raised her, has suffered the amputation of one leg because of uncontrolled diabetes. Jackie’s father, Tommy, who has suffered a stroke because he didn’t care about the consequences of high blood pressure. Jackie’s husband, Robert, who has a progressive kidney disease. Abraham has gone out of her way to find more about the American health care system in North Lawndale, Illinois. Throughout the book she talks about how the health care system in America is so unfair and unsatisfactory to the needs of poor people such as the Banes’s Family.

For the last five years of my life I have worked in the healthcare industry. One of the biggest issues plaguing our nation today has been the ever rising cost of health care. If we don't get costs under control, we risk losing the entire system, as well as potentially crippling our economy. For the sake of our future, we must find a way to lower the cost of health care in this nation.

Widening economic inequality in the United States is being accompanied by increasing health care disparity. While the health care system seeks to provide health care as a human right, it fails to do so often worsening the disparities (Dickman, Himmelstein, & Woolhandler, 2017). While health care today has made major strides, there are many people who are still suffering from health care system injustices. Of the people who are still uninsured a majority of them are in the middle-working class or those living in poverty. Poor Americans have less access to health care than wealthy Americans. The life expectancy gap between the rich and poor continues to widen. Health care in poor communities is too often neglected. This issue has been a trend in the United States for many years. In Abraham’s book, Mama might be better off dead these very same inequalities are evident for the Banes family. Because of these inequalities, preventive illness becomes life threatening causing care to then become extensive and even more expensive.

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 medical industrial complex (MIC) holds many influences in the care of women, especially poor marginalized women. MIC is simply a platform of the network among corporations that supply health care services and products to make money. Oparah and Bonaparte explain how the individual’s ability to pay determines the quality of care they receive (Oparah & Bonaparte, 2015, pg. 4). In relations to birthing, hospitals aren’t a place for an intimate connection between a woman that’s about to give birth and their newborns. It’s more of a time efficiency center where doctors (mainly white men) would purposely perform cesarean deliveries to not only save time, but to make a

This diagnoses of the flaws in our health care system must start with identifying and redefining the social constructs of America. In most other civilized nations, it is generally accepted that it is in the best interest of the public that every individual be

Reid’s goal is not only to compare health care, but to discover solutions for America within foreign models. Like many Americans, Reid is quite dissatisfied with the U.S. health care system. Even more, he is perplexed by how an industrialized, wealthy nation like the United States could rate so poorly in comparison to other nations. “With the help from many scholars and the Kaiser Family Foundation I traveled the world searching for a prescription to fix our country’s seriously ailing health care system” (8). While simultaneously seeking care for an injured shoulder, Reid is able to personally experience various health care systems, seeking elements that could help America.

What would it be like to come to a country and not understand anything about its health care system? To many this would be a very daunting task. Unfortunately, this is the scenario that the Lee family has to deal with in the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. The Lee family, and the other thousands of Hmong immigrants, try to understand and navigate the complex and sometimes confusing health care system of the United States. As the book points out, the values and ideals of the Hmong culture and the United States health care system are not always the same and sometimes come into great conflict with each other. Lia Lee was unfortunately the person stuck in the middle of this great conflict.

U.S. health care reform is currently one of the most heavily discussed topics in health discourse and politics. After former President Clinton’s failed attempt at health care reform in the mid-1990s, the Bush administration showed no serious efforts at achieving universal health coverage for the millions of uninsured Americans. With Barack Obama as the current U.S. President, health care reform is once again a top priority. President Obama has made a promise to “provide affordable, comprehensive, and portable health coverage for all Americans…” by the end of his first term (Barackobama.com). The heated debate between the two major political parties over health care reform revolves around how to pay for it and more importantly, whether it

Throughout the movie, the authors identified troubling faults and failures of the current system. These included the lack of appropriate coverage, the undressing push for finance over health care quality, unsustainable costs, unethical business transactions and risks, the failure of healthcare in the United States to address the underlying issue of disease processes and the commonality of treating symptoms verse the cause.