How Healthcare Has Changed Since Its First Trial And Error Days

Despite the great accomplishments and many changes the United States health care payment system has made over the years, it is not a surprise that the system still continues to face serious challenges. Our country offers advanced technology and medicine, but it still has millions of Americans who do not have proper coverage to meet their medical needs or are uninsured and therefore cannot benefit from our advanced system. This raises a serious concern in population health, which makes us questions the country’s current system. The United States has commercial and government insurance options with different premiums and levels of coverage for its citizens. However, our complex system presents many flaws that lead Americans to live

Since the advent of health insurance in the 1950s, there have been many models of care that are come to the scene in an attempt to both control cost of care and improve quality of care. Insurance models came into being because the fee for service model used until then was proving to increase cost of healthcare without any measure of quality of services and care provided. Health insurance models have evolved from the basic hospital offered insurance to employer sponsored coverage plans. The US health system is broken both financially and quality wise with more than 20% of gross domestic product being spent on healthcare (Blackstone, 2016).

Insurance is a critical part in the health care of Americans that would use it for life threatening, unaffordable and spontaneous health issues. But instead insurance has created substantial problem because it is being utilized as a payment system for everyday primary health care and not to cure

The healthcare system of the United States was established as a system of health and welfare programs created to provide affordable treatment to the citizens of the United States. Recently, the Affordable Health Care Act was passed changing the structure of the system (Mulvany, 2012). While in theory the new arrangement works, it has its flaws due to the resulting cost, slowness, and the government interfering with religious and personal beliefs. These problems have led many people to question the role of the government in the life of the individual.

Since signed into law on March 23, 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been the central influence of the type of health care in the United States. It put into place a system that requires citizens to buy private insurance policies, but it also provides partial subsidies for those policies. This act is the culmination of years of American health care debates and reforms dating all the way back to the early 1900’s. Health care got its start with the rise of industrialization, with a growing workforce came a demand for stable wages that would be safe from the risk of illness. Spanning from 1914 to 1920, the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) “promoted a model state bill for employment-based sickness insurance” (Gordon 12).

In the United States, the health market system is defective to the citizen. Even though the market is available to all citizens; There are at least half of a million Americans without health insurance plans. The costs of health in the United States have historically been unfavorable. This can be traced to the fact that the health sector is driven by a market-based system (Fernandez, 2010; Harris, 2011). This means that most of the health insurance companies are privately owned. The companies provide including basic medical expense plans and catastrophic hospital expense plans to accommodate the needs of consumers. It also offers supplemental products that provide protection against risks, including dental, vision, disability, critical

Norma Raffel and Marshall Raffel’s The U.S. Health System: Origins and Functions presents a thorough history of healthcare in the United States and explains the present situation. The current U.S. system of federal healthcare came into being in 1965 through Congress’s amendment of the Social Security Act and the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare began as a national health insurance program for persons age 65 and over, regardless of income or wealth. In 1973, coverage was extended for those on disability for at least two consecutive years. Medicare provides enrollees with a basic program of hospital insurance and supplementary assistance program to aid in paying healthcare bills (Raffel,

In 1927, the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care was formed. These committees, which included health economists, physicians, and public health experts, researched the American health care environment and produced in 1932 a landmark report Medical Care for American People which revealed the significant discrepancy in costs, quality, and quantity of medical services in the United States. The primary concern is that health care systems do not provide sufficient services to satisfy the health care needs of Americans, especially the minorities. However, people do not have the financial stability to support their health care needs. Therefore, it was proposed to transform the system so that health care would be financed through insurance and taxation (Jost, 2012, p. 54). In fact the initiative was widely supported and the first insurance plans appeared.

One of the greatest changes in healthcare in the past ten years has been the rise of managed care, much to the displeasure of many patients and physicians alike. Managed care arose out of concern about spiraling healthcare costs and was designed to encourage physicians to give patients treatments that were cost-effective out of their own financial interests. "The consumer strategy was directed at imposing some barriers to use by levying various forms of co-insurance. The most common approaches used either deductibles (where the consumer paid the first portion of the bill a technique familiar in other types of insurance) or co-payments (where the consumer paid a portion of the bill and the insurance company the rest) or a combination of both' (Kane et al 1994). Managed care has given health insurance companies an increasingly significant voice in how treatment is administered and allocated. Managed care has proliferated in the past decade despite considerable criticism of the practice of 'nickel and diming' patients as well as the considerable bureaucratic red tape it is has generated. Also, research indicates that healthy, well-insured patients tend to over-consume care without meaningful co-pays but poorer, sicker patients can be deterred even by moderate co-payments and suffer negative health consequences (Kane et al 1994). However, managed care has not gone away and is a reality that all healthcare

In the early 1930’s, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Organization led consumers to hospitalization and medical coverage under their own charter for everyone who sought coverage for one prepaid fee.  Years later, other insurance companies, such as Kaiser Permanente began to offer coverage to consumers within their geographic boundary. However, health care spending is on the rise. Over the last couple of decades the expenditures have risen from 724.0 billion dollars in 1990 to 2,486.3 billion in 2009(US census, 2011). Today, we are a nation with Health Care Reform signed into law by President Obama

In the past few decades, there have been many possible solutions to the increasing problem that healthcare reform did not take place in the United States. During this period, healthcare coverage has reduced while premiums increased to extent that they have worsened the situation. Since the country has a private healthcare system, the private system has largely been unable to provide coverage to the millions of uninsured Americans.

The united states of America need to change its healthcare policies and procedures and to adopt from other countries their successful healthcare systems. There are at least 36 other countries that have better health systems other than the united states of America. The capitalistic characteristics of the American healthcare system might affect the public of the nation dramatically when money is the real and only mean of judgment and measurement a determination of how to cure its citizens. The problems the citizens face with the healthcare system of America can be solved by adopting with proper adjustments that best suit the political views of the United States of America. There are many examples like for example; Canada, The UK, France, and

“Medical Care” is the provision by a physician of services related to the maintenance of health, prevention of illness, and the treatment of illness and injury. The high cost of medical care has been a recurrent theme in countries around the world. In the United States, medical expenses absorb one-sixth of the total annual output of the economy. Medical care is one of the many goods and services that can be provided in a wide variety of ways. At one time, it was common for ill people to buy medicine and pay doctors using their own money. Today, both the medical care and medicines are often paid for by third parties through either political or market institutions for example by insurance companies or government agencies, or both, with or without some portion being paid by the individual patient.

The world of healthcare has been revolutionized and changed ever since the end of World War II from the passing of Medicare to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act. It seems lately, though, that the biggest changes have happened in the last ten years. Along with changes in policy, hospitals have taken on themselves to change the whole meaning of amenities and what a hospital should offer their patients. In my opinion, these changes that offer more amenities, transforming hospitals by becoming more patient-oriented, are crucial to making the whole patient experience more valuable. But what exactly are amenities in a hospital setting? Although one might confuse them with concierge services, they are simply included luxury services with no extra cost for patients and guests. For example, they can range from a lobby seen at a five-star hotel to complementary valet parking, premium television channel, wireless internet services, and private rooms for patients.

“The maintenance and improvement of physical and mental health, especially through the provision of medical services” – Healthcare. These services aren’t something that just happened 10 years ago. Hospital and medical expense policies were introduced during the first half of the 20th century. During the 1920s, some hospitals began offering services to individuals on a “pre-paid” basis which eventually leaded to the development of Blue Cross Organizations in the 1930s. throughout the years health care has changed rapidly, in the 1940s, prepaid group healthcare began, it seemed as radical.