Strength And Weaknesses Of Health Care Systems Essay

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the Healthcare system in the United States versus the Healthcare system in the United Kingdom. When comparing the healthcare systems of the two countries the first thing that should be done is determining the differences between a “Good Healthcare System, which is the best attainable average level and a Fair Healthcare System, which is the smallest feasible differences among individuals and groups.” Ibid., p. 27-35 Data also analyzed in Gerard Anderson and

Health care systems are different in every country around the world. There are four main components that complete a health care delivery system, described by Shi and Singh (2015) as the quad-function model, which includes insurance, financing, payment and delivery of care (p. 5). Along with the components of the quad-function model it is important to analyze a countries access to care, their health outcomes and how public health is integrated into the health care delivery system. The United States has a unique health care system that is like no other country. Great Britian, in contrast, also has a unique system that is very different than the United States.

The United States health care system is unique among other advanced countries. This system does not have a central governing agency, it is delivered under imperfect market conditions, there are multiple players and payers, and there is no universal health care coverage (Shi & Singh, 2015, p. 9). In a time where healthcare reform is being discussed, it is important for the United States to consider what is proactive as well as what is failing the system. That is what Sick Around The World did; the documentary compared five other countries’ (United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and Switzerland) healthcare systems to see how they stacked up against the United States.

Health care is meant to provide medical or psychological care for the entire human population. In order to pay for health care, one must have health insurance or be able to pay out of pocket. However, health care in the United States are nowhere near cheap. In fact, America has the worst healthcare system in the world. America’s health care system is a direct-fee system. A majority of countries around the globe are government controlled. Taxes primarily finance their health care access and delivery. Unfortunately, for America, the US government does not pay for most of its citizens’ health care (Health Care Issues, 2015). America’s health care system is in jeopardy due to increasingly high prices and lack of access.

The single most important impetus for healthcare reform throughout recent history has been rising costs (Sultz, 2006). In the book called The healing of America: a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care, Reid wrote that the nation’s health care system has become excessively expensive, ineffective, and unjust. Among the world’s developed nations, the US ranks near the bottom for healthcare access and quality. However, the US ranks at the top for health expenditure as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and average of $7,400 per person (Reid, 2010). Therefore, Americans are spending

According to data presented by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US health care cost exceeded $ 8,000 per capita, in 2010, comparing to the next most expensive system (Norway) $5,000 per capita (OECD Health Data, 2012). Despite being the most expensive system in the word, US healthcare system has failed on many areas of performance and quality. According to OECD data, US has much lower life expectancy than other industrialized countries, also the infant mortality rate is higher than those countries. Moreover, the US is the only industrialized country that does not provide its citizens a protection of a universal health care coverage.

In fact, the spending disparity between the U.S. and the other twelve countries is so vast that only the graph shown above can truly do it justice (commonwealth fund OECD Health Data 2016). The most shocking fact to consider is that despite such high spending, the U.S. still performs worse than these countries on health care. Where the quality of performance is determined by quality, access, efficiency, equity, and life expectancy the U.S. ranks dead last out of the twelve countries. With the exception of Switzerland, the second highest spending country, all of these countries have health care systems that are single-payer, universal, or both

to adopt a single payer health care system to replace our current health care system. One of the ways this article helps me prove this point is by showing that the American health care system is poor compared to the other developed nations. Lindeque excellently proves this point with evidence from experts, “The United States ranks 37th in the world in terms of quality in fairness in its health care system, according to the World Health Organization”. Lindeque also uses some other numbers to show that the United States spends way more on its healthcare than other developed nations. The evidence in this article shows that the United States spends way more money on less quality care. This will go a long way in helping me prove the American health care system is in need of serious reform. Lindeque’s analysis of the health care system of other countries also is very useful. In this portion of the article Lindeque writes that the British spend half as much on health care as the U.S while having better health care statistics and overall better health statistics like higher life expectancy and infant mortality rate. These facts show that the U.K system is far superior because they spend half as much as their American counterparts to get an overall better healthcare system. The single payer system of the U.K. is better and facts and observations from health experts coming from this article proves this assertion to be true. The information Lindeque put in this article will go a long way in proving my argument to be

According to the World Health Organization’s ranking of the world’s health systems the United States ranks at number 37 overall and is the only wealthy industrialized nation that doesn 't have a universal healthcare system. If this is to be fixed we need to take a look at other countries systems and learn how to improve conditions. This paper is going to talk about five countries; Spain, Germany, Canada, Cuba, and the United States. These countries cover a wide variety of healthcare systems. According to most lists America has the worst health care of these countries so it should try to learn from these countries to improve itself.

The health care system in America has continued to fail many Americans until date. Although the government continues to try and improve it, America still has one of the most expensive yet worst health care systems in the developed world (Hellman, 2014). Health care reform needs to be greatly focused on in order to combat the inequalities within the system. While reading Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America, the author described numerous ways in which the health care system failed the Banes’s family.

The United States is considered by many to be the greatest country in the world. However, when it comes to health care the US is ranked behind 36 other countries, according to the World Health Organization. If one was to do any research at all, they would find that an overwhelming 34 of these 36 countries all have one thing in common. They all use a universal health care system. This is not just a mere coincidence. The problems and outrageous cost within the US healthcare system causes over 700,000 Americans to go bankrupt every year. This staggering problem simply does not occur in any other industrialized countries. Accounting for these facts the United States needs to move quickly to embrace

The United States system of healthcare when compared with healthcare systems in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and Taiwan is far more expensive, is notably inefficient, leaves 47 million people uninsured, and forces "hundreds of thousands of people into bankruptcy," according to a PBS video "Sick Around the World." This paper compares the current U.S. healthcare system which at the moment is undergoing a difficult transition into the Affordable Care Act with the healthcare programs in the above-mentioned countries.

The United States is the most powerful countries in the world and plays a central leadership role in the world. The U.S. health care policy is amongst the finest and many industrialized nations are laboring toughly to emulate a health care system that mimic the scheme executed by the United States. The United States of America is well known with its high-priced health care system in the globe because they expends farther than its counterparts related to the Gross Domestic product (GDP) per capita approximately “18%” (Kinckman & Kovner, 2015).

The healthcare system plays a key role in the economic stability of our country, as every year trillions are spent in attempt to combat disease and health issues that plaque humanity. As it makes up a significant amount of the expenditures in the economy, so the costs associated with health care of those in pain from illness and injury, including lost productivity, increased need of assistance in living and also the cost of death in some cases, is important to the economic stability and over all standard of living in our country. The key to economic prosperity is balancing the need for care with the costs of illness to keep as many people healthy and well without breaking the bank of collective society. The costs of healthcare have been increasingly problematic in recent years with so many issues surrounding the current system. With the “total health care spending in the United States expected to reach $4.8 trillion in 2021, up from $2.6 trillion in 2010 and $75 billion in 1970, meaning that health care spending will account for nearly 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), or one-fifth of the U.S. economy, by 2021” (Aetna). With this in mind it is apparent that as we look at the trillion-dollar industry of the medical community it seems that it needs to be a major focus of our nation as a whole and with the many issues come many creative solutions. First let us analyze the reasons behind the current cost and the major problems facing this industry and than discus what

The current state of United States’ health care system is one of the most polarizing subjects of debate among scholars and other health care professionals across the globe. This can be attributed to the fact that at one extreme end, there are some who argue that that Americans have the best system of health care in the world (MePhee, 2013). Perhaps the availability of the state-of-the-art facilities and free medical technology that have become highly symbolic of the various industries in the United States have motivated the idea of the country’s health care system being unparalleled to others. However, there is a common belief that the fight for universal health care can only be successful if its current state of health care is described as a failure in the modern era as emphasized by MePhee (2013).