Health Care Reforms on November

Health Care Reforms On November 18, 2009 the United States Senate tabled a sweeping health care reform bill aimed at expanding insurance coverage to 31 million Americans that are currently uninsured (Pear & Herszenhorn, 2009). This move followed the tabling of a similar but slightly more expansive bill in the House of Representatives a week earlier. Health care reform in the United States is now in the home stretch. Debate about the issue has been highly contentious.

This paper will outline the terms of the debate and analyze the Obama administration's plan for health care reform. Why Health Care is Important Although it is considered to be the wealthiest of the world's major economies, the United State is the only one of the world's industrialized nations that does not provide its citizens with health care (PTI, 2009). The system in the United States is a private, for-profit system. The current system has excelled at its mandate.

The problem as many Americans see it is that the mandate of public companies is, as Milton Friedman famously explained, to maximize shareholder wealth (Friedman, 1970). The Obama administration takes a different view, and wishes to lower the health care gap between the United States and other industrialized nations in the provision of health care. There are several reasons why this is desirable. One is that the United States lags other industrialized nations in many key health care metrics, such as life expectancy. Studies between those in the U.S.

with health insurance and those without reveals that those with health coverage has lower infant mortality, lower death rates from a number of diseases, fewer ailments and higher quality of life. Ignoring the cost of quality of life, the cost of premature death due to lack of health care is $140 billion per year -- more than the cost of the health care plan (Bilmes & Day, 2009). The current health care reform plan will have an impact on the way the American health care system works.

Although there are differences of opinion with respect to what those impacts might be, the health care outcomes are liable to be positive. There will be economic costs as well -- the Senate plan is $849 billion and the House plan is over $1 trillion. This cost will be spread over 10 years, but will need to be paid for via a range of taxes and fund redistributions.

How Doctors Feel About Health Care Reform When Harry Truman originally proposed a national health insurance system, similar to the systems that were emerging in Canada at the time, the American Medical Association opposed the plan. The opposition was sufficiently virulent to scuttle the plan, which otherwise met with little opposition. The AMA cited concerns over caps on doctor's salaries as a key reason for its opposition (Farrell, 2006).

The AMA to this day regulates doctor's salaries by managing the number of spaces open in America's medical schools and the licensing of immigrant physicians. Today, the American Medical Association supports HR 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The AMA supports the act on the basis that it in congruent with their principles of pluralism, freedom of choice, freedom of physician practice and universal access. From an economic perspective, demand for physicians would increase dramatically with the public insurance option, which benefits the AMA.

That the current health care reform bill does this without infringing on doctor's rights to practice has earned it the AMA support. Pros and Cons of Health Care Reform In his 2007 book Conscience of a Liberal, Nobel-winning economist states the case for health care reform. "America spends significantly more on health care than anyone else, it doesn't seem to buy significantly more carewe are middle of the pack in terms of what we actually get for the money." Part of the problem is that the insurance system is inefficient.

Insurance companies spend money trying to find ways to deny health care to people, which ultimately adds to administrative costs. In the U.S., administrative costs are 31% of health care costs, compared with 19% in Canada. The proposed health care reform is also expected to improve health outcomes. By shifting some of the focus of the system away from maximizing shareholder value and towards improving health outcomes, Americans should live longer, have better access to care, see improved quality of life and have lower mortality rates for a number of diseases.

In addition to providing better health care, the reform plan will have several positive economic impacts. The Boston Globe calculation (Bilmes & Day, 2009) determined that life lost due to inadequate insurance cost the U.S. economy $140 billion per year, less than the cost of the Obama health care plan. In addition, the high cost of health care insurance is a competitive disadvantage for American companies.

It is one of the reasons why tens of thousands of automobile manufacturing jobs relocated from Michigan to Ontario, and now those jobs are starting to trickle to Mexico. It is estimated that the cost of health care for an American worker is now over $10,000 per year and this figure is expected to double within ten years (Arnst, 2009). Given that 99% of companies over 200 employees provide health insurance, it is clear that dropping coverage is not an option.

A public health care option would help to lower the cost of employer health care, thereby reducing this competitive disadvantage (Dean, 2009). These gains are not without cost. The $849 billion Senate plan represents an enormous amount of money. The U.S. economy is already struggling with the weight of deficit, thanks to the Bush Administration's overspending and the cost of the bi-party bailouts.

While the current system is more costly than the reformed system will be, the current system spreads those costs out so that individuals affected pay a high cost and unaffected individuals pay no cost. The reformed system puts them on the American taxpayer, so that everybody pays some cost. This will almost assuredly require higher taxes. Insurance company profits will also decline, but that is less a concern for those who do not own stock in insurance companies. There will also be backlash from a variety of industry groups.

It is difficult to predict what form this backlash may take, but as Senator Tom Daschle (2008) explains, the current system benefits a wide range of.