Editorial response to scholarly discourse

¶ … Top Health News Story of 2011: Health Care Reform and a System in Flux." (American Journal of Nursing, 2012), the Affordable Care Act of 2010 was an important step in improving the quality and sufficiency of American healthcare, but it represents only a very small measure of much larger improvements that are necessary. More specifically, the author uses the phrase "the elephant in the room" referring to the fact that the cost of American healthcare is higher than that of any other industrialized nation and that American healthcare ranks significantly behind other nations in terms of mortality, preventable deaths, cost, and accessibility of care (Molyneux, 2012). The author also alludes to the need to abandon the fee-for-services model of healthcare compensation by providing examples of several states that have already made progress in the direction of a shift toward a results-based compensation model.

Those observations are entirely accurate; if anything, they still understate the magnitude of the problem. While other industrialized nations typically offer national healthcare systems that cover all citizens, approximately 50 million Americans cannot afford health insurance in the U.S. And as many as 50,000 Americans die prematurely from preventable conditions annually, as a direct result of their inability to obtain necessary healthcare services (Reid, 2009). Besides the inefficiency and lack of accountability attributable to the fee-for-services compensation model, the other systemic problem that must be addressed and changed is the complete dominance of American healthcare by the for-profit health insurance industry (Reid, 2009). If the U.S. is ever to resolve its healthcare crisis, it must limit the profits of health insurance companies by law, or by establishing a public option to compete with private insurers (Reid, 2009).