Healthcare Health Care Research Health

Healthcare

Health Care Research

Health care in the United States is provided to the people by many separate sources. There is no nationwide system of government owned facilities from which the citizens can partake. Ownership of the health care system is done through private entities, although there are some federal, states, county, and city owned facilities (David, 2005). The majority of citizens have private insurance to cover the cost of medical services. Public insurance is provided for the poor in the form of Medicaid and for those over the age of 65 in the form of Medicare. Basically healthcare in the U.S. is run by the medical providers and the insurance companies.

Federal spending in America on health care is staggering. In the year 2007, the U.S. spent $2.26 trillion on health care, or $7,439 per person. This was up from $2.1 trillion, or $7,026 per person, the year before. America spends roughly the same amount of money on health care each year that they do on defense. Each of these represents approximately 24% of total federal spending, and together makes up nearly half of the entire federal budget (Honore, 2009).

Health care spending is not the only problem that is seen with the American health care system. One of the other problems that stem from the poorly designed health care system is that many people fall through the cracks of the system. Approximately 46 million Americans have no health insurance, and this number is continually on the rise. Those who do have health insurance find themselves with plan that is designed around healing the sick and less on prevention. The majority of the uninsured are often members of the working poor. These people are more likely to experience financial hardships caused by inadequate insurance coverage (Honore, 2009).

Many experts feel that a comprehensive health care reform is needed in order to rectify the current situation. Even though the U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world, it ranks dead last in quality health results. This poor healthcare system affects Americans from birth to death. "Infant mortality rates in America are higher than in Cuba and, astonishingly, in some American communities, babies die before the age of one at rates greater than in Vietnam" (Honore, 2009).

Canada is the last industrialized nation to rely exclusively on government funding for its core healthcare system (Beaudan, 2002). Canada does not have a fully nationalized system healthcare though since its doctors are in private practice and send their bills to the government for reimbursement (Duff-Brown, 2005).

There are several issues that plague the Canadian health care system, these include: it forbids any form of user payment or private care for core services, there are a limited number of doctors and there is not enough access to high technology. Canada has 1.8 doctors per 1,000 people, which ranks it 17th on a list of 20 countries that have universal access. In order to be where they need to be, they would need to add 48,000 doctors to the current roster of 57,000. Canada is even further behind in its access to high tech equipment, including machines used for MRI's and CAT scans. This shortage of equipment affects wait time for diagnostic tests, which in some provinces can run well over three months (Beaudan, 2002).

According to Michael Decter, chair of the national board of Canadian Institute for Health Information, the Canadian health care system is dazed but he still believes that modernized public healthcare is the answer. "We do well on life expectancy and immunization of children compared to the U.S.," he says, noting that the United States spends 40% more on healthcare than Canada does (Beaudan, 2002).

Americans who go to Canada for cheap flu shots often come away impressed at how Canada offers free and first class medical care to everyone. But hospital administrators will tell a different story about having to cut staff for lack of funds or about having to tell a mother that their teenager would have to wait up to three years for surgery to repair a torn knee ligament. The average Canadian family pays about 48% in income taxes each year part of which goes to fund the healthcare system. Rates vary from province to province throughout Canada, but Ontario, one of the most populated provinces, spends nearly 40% of every tax dollar on healthcare. The federal government along with almost all of the provinces acknowledges that there is a crisis in the Canada healthcare system. There is a lack of physicians and nurses, a lack of state-of-the-art equipment and a lack of funding (Duff-Brown, 2005).