The Cost Of Dying, A Staggering

"In the past two decades or so, health care has been commercialized as never before, and professionalism in medicine seems to be giving way to entrepreneurialism," commented Arnold S. Relman, professor of medicine and social medicine at Harvard Medical School (Wekesser 66). This statement may have a great deal of bearing on reality. The tangled knot of insurers, physicians, drug companies, and hospitals that we call our health system are not as unselfish and focused on the patients' needs as people would like to think. Pharmaceutical companies are particularly ruthless, many of them spending millions of dollars per year to convince doctors to prescribe their drugs and to convince consumers that their specific brand of drug is needed in

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.

Austin, A., & Wetle, V. (2012). The United States health care system, combining business, health, and delivery. (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Creating a health care reform plan for the U.S. health care system is no easy task. Multiple things must be taken into consideration. These include making insurance affordable, making sure the plan is economically feasible, and creating a plan that will still work in the future. What hindered the reshaping of health care into a sustainable system in the past, are the health sectors interests that prefer the status quo. By continuing to cling on to yesterday’s model, the health care industry is creating its own peril (Schaeffer, 2007).

The healthcare system is one that will always be needed by society. The amount of abuse the system receives depends on the amount of uninsured citizens. If a patient is uninsured, their bills typically fall to the Medicare system. Because of this, the elderly are unable to use the benefits of Medicare as they should be allotted. By initiating the Affordable Care Act, the government is attempting to realign the balance between the insurance companies and Medicare, and to provide millions of uninsured Americans the opportunity to have medical insurance (King, 2011). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the Affordable Care Act, and how it affects my personal nursing practice.

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. The Affordable Care Act also nicknamed as “ObamaCare” faced huge amounts of adversity and challenges on its way to being ratified and upheld by the Supreme Court. Some of these arguments highlight the disadvantages of free social services, the escalating federal deficit, and the altering the healthcare industry’s landscape completely. Healthcare is generally defined as providing for the wellbeing of a personal through medical services. In America, all services come with a price, and healthcare has become an industry that is nearly only about the money and less about the patient. Needless to say, the quality of care that a patient receives is almost

The Obamacare/ACA, might have helped numerous of individuals in acquiring health care, but the health professionals are facing a shortage of reimbursement difference for their services. As a result, Hospitals and healthcare providers were force to layoff personal and come up with innovative solutions. This point is proven by the renowned author, Amy Anderson by stating as follows: “The American health care framework has had shortages of personnel for quite some time and would not be prepared to give the adequate service to this amount of patients in need of medical attention. Training new professional health services personnel could take years. There is a shortage of graduates from medical and nursing schools. Doctors, nurses and health professional are sharing responsibilities prospective patients will face a longer wait time”. (Anderson, 2014)

Through the history of health care, the standard of care changed from protecting our patient from injury and illness to a systemic entity to make money for insurance companies. Access to services and clinical outcomes are dependent on what health insurance providers will “pay” for in a clinical or community setting; as a result, patient safety, care and satisfaction has been negatively impacted.

3.2 trillion dollars are spent every year on the United States healthcare system (CMS). Estimates report that on average there are 2.6 million deaths in America on a yearly basis (CDC). The source of these calamities is simple: a poor healthcare system. Until American political parties arrive at a consensus, this country’s citizens will continue to fight the war on healthcare. Meanwhile politicians and hospitals fight each other tooth and nail, Atul Gawande, in his article “Overkill”, takes an insider approach into the current health care system to uncover the flaws that are that are forcing patients to collectively pay trillions of dollars each year for healthcare. However, while he does pose valid claims, he misinterprets the culprit and

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) introduced by the Obama administration is expected to provide health insurance benefits to approximately 30 million Americans. Nonetheless, coverage expansion is not synonymous with actual care expansion, and this dissimilarity is becoming much clearer. When the national health law was passed by Congress, it unleashed tsunami mayhem of insured new patients and a consequent flooding of a system of deliver that was already fragile and strained. For decades now, the American health care system has experienced exponential workforce shortages and is hardly prepared to meet the huge influx of patients efficiently or effectively. Successful training of new nurses, physicians as well as other health care professionals takes several years or eve decades. With less graduates from medical and nursing schools and an increase in innovation for sharing responsibilities and roles among doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, patients and families will be susceptible to extended wait times, extreme difficulty in accessing healthcare providers, shorter time with providers, further costs and other new frustrations with health care delivery (Anderson, 2014).

The messed up status of the existing healthcare system is so much wanting. Medicaid killed the market forces and Medicare initiated by the government where the insurance given is of poor quality and over taxed on the workers who are the contributors (Mitchell, 2013). This also brought about over insurance, which is not proportional to the service rendered to the contributors when they fall ill. This is all problematic and uneconomical to them (Mitchell, 2013).

This week’s article by Liz Welch titled, Physician, Healthy Industry discusses why our health care industry should not be run as a business. The doctor interviewed by Welch is a Boston-based physician, Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle who runs a company called Iora. He addresses the primary care experience including the coding, billing, and copays in our current health care industry. His argument is that the system should not make a physician do what they do not want to do. He states, “I’d seen 40 patients, and had to stay two hours after work to finish up notes, because that’s what these stupid systems make you do” (Welch, 2015, para. 2). Dr. Fernandopulle frustrations are with the paper pushing process that our health care system requires of all physicians, but he decides to focus on the patient and their concerns, rather than the paperwork aspect. The purpose of Dr. Fernandopulle interview was to reduce the rising health care costs and start looking at the patient closely to prevent unwanted and unnecessary emergency room visits.

The United States healthcare delivery system is a uniquely developed system that involves various features, components, and services. The US delivery system is massive, with total employment in various healthcare settings of qualified medical professionals that provide key functions to delivering quality healthcare. The market-oriented economy in the United States attracts a variety of private entrepreneurs driven by the pursuit of profits obtained by carrying out the key functions of healthcare delivery (Shi et al. 2015).

The future of healthcare if left as is, the system will falter and eventually, a new reform will be realized as necessitous (Garman, Butler , & Brinkmeyer, 2006). When the system proposed fail to meet

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