ipl-logo

Health Care Gap Analysis

984 Words4 Pages

Troubled Past

The United States health policy is an enigma to most of my European friends (Germans, Irish, Brits, etc.) who have a difficult time comprehending how the richest nation can let people die without access to affordable health care. Unlike other nations, the US health policy is entrenched in its dark history as a nation. This period includes slavery, Jim Crow laws, class wars, and the foundation of an unequal society. Most scientific and technological advancements in medicine were made during late 19th and most of the 20th century. However, during that period, people of color were still treated as less than compared to the white population. For instance, this 1911 law in Nebraska stated, “Marriages are void when one party is a white …show more content…

Most of the US health policy revolves around insurance companies (payors), hospitals and doctors (providers), and the government in shape of Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The corporatization, rationalization (via Managed Care), and technological advances have been a blessing and a curse for health care delivery. The continued push for new gadgets without clear benchmarks, need gap analysis, or its correlation to the health care quality has led to the exponential growth in health care costs while our politicians have been busy wrapping themselves with the US Constitution and debating whether health care is a right. However, it is well documented that very little was known of medical science in 1776, let alone the imagination to cement health care as a right in the Constitution at that time. In the words of Hanoura of T.C. William High School, “Now, when the founding fathers were drafting the constitution, the idea of someone two hundred years later not being able to pay for their chemo treatments most likely did not cross their minds” (Hanoura, Is Healthcare a Right? …show more content…

In a study, Gilens and Page (2014) concluded that policymaking is dominated by powerful businesses and handful wealthy individuals and therefore, United States is not really a true democracy. The most convincing argument on why the United States lacks a humane approach to health care can be derived from the two figures below. Figure 1 shows the list of most unequal countries where the United States sits at the 7th

Open Document