Analysis of health care reform

¶ … American Health Care

After leading the world in the health of its citizens throughout most of the 20th century, the United States has fallen behind virtually all other wealthy nations in that regard, not to mention having fallen behind several nations that once relied substantially on U.S. aid (Dykman, 2008). While most of the developed world has already embraced the concept of universal government-funded national health care systems, the U.S. still relies on a for-profit model that has proven to be incapable of meeting the health care needs of society in any manner that is efficient, cost-effective, and equally available to all members of society. Even worse, the ongoing political influence of lobbyists for the for-profit health insurance industry continues to succeed in undermining meaningful health care reform (Kennedy, 2006), including by watering down the historic Affordable Care Act that eventually passed into law in 2009. Finally, the available evidence about health care compensation models suggests that effective comprehensive health care reform in the U.S. will also require replacement of the fee-for-services model to a results-based compensation scheme (Reid, 2009).

The failing U.S. health care system is not necessarily an example of market failure requiring intervention. Instead, what would be required would be merely the presence of the government in the form of a competitive option for consumers. That, of course, was precisely the so-called "public option" that many Democrats believed President Barack Obama abandoned much too early in response to Republican opposition, largely because of the influence of lobbyists for the private health care sector furiously working against the President's initiative. In principle, Republicans in Washington have embraced the position that the key to American health care reform depends on reforming the largest public health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and by tightening the eligibility criteria to postpone the entrance of new beneficiaries by raising minimum age requirements. Meanwhile, Democrats have been more concerned with reducing the influence of the private health care sector. Instead of outright intervention, all the government would have to do to promote meaningful health care reform would be to pursue the private option and eliminate the lobbying process that perpetuates fundamental conflicts of interest in Washington. At the operational level, the fee-for-services model of health care compensation has been proven to increase the cost of national health care while simultaneously providing lower quality of care than results-based compensation in health care (Tumulty, Pickert, & Park, 2010).

As many analysts have pointed out, the model of health care in the U.S. In which eligibility for affordable health care services is dictated more by employment status than by anything else is fundamentally flawed (Reid, 2009). At the same time, the substantially unregulated aspect of the private health insurance industry promotes continual cost increases, especially when combined with government programs that reimburse health care providers for services rendered to program beneficiaries.