Essay Help : U.S. Health Care - Essay Samples

U.S. Health Care - Essay Samples

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U.S. Health Care System

The press has been increasingly preoccupied with accounts of all that is wrong, often seriously wrong, with the U.S. health care system. Without denying the legitimacy of the many complaints and criticisms, it is important to remember that much is also right with our health care delivery system. The merits and strengths of the system need to be recognized, if only to ensure that in some headlong effort at reform, we do not undermine characteristics and values that should be preserved and reinforced.

Americans who are preparing for a stint overseas or a trip abroad invariably face the question of how and where to seek medical care in case of serious illness or injury. The tentative answers depend on the continents and countries that are on the itinerary and, of course, the nature of the disease or disability that occurs. In the early postwar decades, more often than not the choice was to return, whenever possible, to the United States for definitive treatment. Even now, in the 1990s, a prompt flight to the United States remains for most Americans, physicians and non-physicians alike, the preferred avenue. This decision might seem to reflect an overvaluation of the quality of medical treatment in the United States or a hypercritical view of the quality of care available in other advanced nations, but the judgment is not seriously awry. One conclusion is unequivocal: In a serious emergency, admission to a hospital selected at random in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Italy is far less advisable than admission to a major teaching hospital in the United States.

The significant advantage that the United States has over other advanced countries is the much higher probability that a teaching hospital of reasonable size will be well staffed by an array of specialists and sub-specialists, with appropriate support personnel and advanced technology at their disposal. The 1,200 teaching hospitals in the United States, and particularly the 320 members of the Council of Teaching Hospitals, are in a position to provide all patients whom they admit medical care that is probably superior in quality to that available anywhere else in the world. (Aaron Henry J. 2018) This was not always the case, but it has become increasingly so during the past quarter century in which there has been a marked upgrading of the capability of acute care hospitals in medium-sized and even smaller communities throughout the United States, under-girded by a massive expansion in the number of well-trained physicians.

It is worth noting that the continental United States, a land mass of more than 3 million square miles, is larger in area than all four principal Western European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain) combined and that its population of 260 million exceeds their combined total. One of the striking achievements of the United States during the past decades has been the establishment of a uniformly high standard of physician care and acute hospital care that is available to most, if not all, Americans.

Another major source of strength of the U.S. health care system has been the leadership that the federal government assumed at the end of World War II in becoming the principal funder of basic biomedical research. It has carried out this role primarily in direct association with the nation's leading universities and medical schools and indirectly with the for-profit pharmaceutical and medical supply companies. The trend in research funding has been uninterruptedly in one direction, up, to a national level currently approaching $30 billion annually. The substantial advances in the biomedical knowledge base have been the foundation for steady progress in the clinical treatment of a wide variety of previously fatal or crippling diseases and have produced corresponding gains in the quality of life of the elderly (as well as of many younger persons) and in the average longevity of both men and women. Throughout the post-World War II decades, the biomedical research effort in the United States has far outpaced that of the rest of the industrial world, although recently Germany and Japan have begun to compete by substantially increasing their research outlays.

It is often contended that the emphasis in the health care community on high-tech medicine and the rapid development and diffusion of new modes of diagnosis and treatment is intrinsically flawed. The human life span appears to have an upper limit (it is rare for an individual to live past age one hundred), and, the argument goes, if one does not die of cancer or stroke, the likely alternative is heart disease or other organ failure.

 

References
Aaron Henry J. In Serious and Unstable Condition: Financing American Health Care. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2018.