Evolution of Health Services in

¶ … Evolution of Health Services in the United States Having an understanding of health services in the United States can help provide insight as to why Americans are so resistant to instating a single-payer system which could provide universal healthcare coverage to all U.S. citizens. From its conception as a nation, the United States has emphasized individualism, and the ability of people to 'make it on their own' in America.

This stands in stark contrast to the relationship between the government and the individual in the European welfare states, or in Canada, where the government is seen as having an obligation to engineer a more just and equitable society, not simply provide a level playing field of freedoms for its citizens. In America, the admission that someone is sick or weak in a society where everyone is supposed to be healthy and strong is profoundly disturbing to the American ideal of self-reliance.

America's social services, as they exist, arose largely as the result of the Great Depression, a relatively unusual period of tremendous economic suffering and questioning of the American dream. Even then, social services were largely extended to those citizens who were most vulnerable, like the unemployed, elderly, and young. Today, the idea that someone can be working, middle-class, yet still not have adequate access to affordable health insurance is likely to suggest to many Americans that the individual is at fault, not that the system itself is at fault.

Horror stories about people taken advantage of by their insurance companies when the companies refuse.