Why are Americans so worked up about health care reform? Statements such as “don’t touch my Medicare” or “everyone should have access to state-of-the-art health care irrespective of cost” are, in my opinion, uninformed and visceral responses that indicate a poor understanding of our healthcare system’s history, its current and future resources and the funding
challenges that America faces going forward. While we all wonder how the healthcare system has reached what some call a crisis stage. Let’s take some of the emotion out of the debate by briefly examining how health care in this country emerged and how that has formed our thinking and culture about health care. With that as a foundation, let’s look at the pros and cons of the Obama administration’s health care reform proposals, and let’s look at the concepts put forth by
the Republicans. We all agree that access to state-of-the-art healthcare services would benefit this country. Experiencing a serious illness is one of life’s significant challenges, and facing it without the means to pay for it isn’t very comforting. But as we shall see, once we know the facts, we will find that achieving this goal will not be easy without our contribution. These are the themes I will touch on to try to make some sense of what is happening to American health care and the steps we can personally take to make things better.
- A recent history of American health care – what has driven the costs so high?
- Key elements of the Obama health care plan
- The Republican view of health care – free market competition
- Universal access to state-of-the-art health care – a worthy goal but not easy to achieve
- what can we do?
First, let’s get a little historical perspective on American health care. This is not intended to be an exhaustive look into that history, but it will give us an appreciation of how the healthcare system and its expectations developed. What drove costs higher and higher? To begin, let’s turn to the American civil war. In that war, dated tactics and the carnage inflicted by modern weapons combined to cause ghastly results. Not generally known is that most of the deaths on both sides of that war were not the result of actual combat but what happened after a battlefield wound was inflicted.
To begin with, the evacuation of the wounded moved at a snail’s pace, which caused severe delays in treating the injured. Secondly, many wounds were subjected to injury care, related surgeries, and amputations of the affected limbs, often resulting in massive infection. So you might survive a battle wound only to die at the hands of medical care providers who, although well-intentioned, interventions were often quite lethal. In total, 600,000 deaths occurred from all causes, over 2% of the U.S. population then! High death tolls can also be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases when no antibiotics existed.
