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What Is Health Insurance In America Essay

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The issue of Health Insurance in America One of the major issues of healthcare in America today is health insurance. There are a few issues that can be seen with our health insurance system, but what might be seen as the biggest problem is access to healthcare. A large portion of the population currently lives without healthcare insurance. It is estimated that around 25 million Americans currently do not have any health insurance. To put this into perspective, this is about 1 in every 13 Americans. And for those with health insurance, the lack of healthcare coverage is still an issue. Healthcare needs are very costly, and leave countless patients with a large amount of medical debt. In fact, medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in America today. There …show more content…

Then, the largest change since then in 2010 was the ACA. The ACA helped increase healthcare access, and required most Americans to obtain health insurance or face a tax penalty. From the very beginning, the rise in healthcare costs has been a problem, and yet as we approach 100 years from when health insurance was first introduced, there hasn’t been much change. With evolving technology, this cost is only estimated to continue to rise, and healthcare spending already takes up a large portion of our GDP. As seen in a chart from Tarik Sammour’s TED Talk, America spends a larger amount of its GDP on healthcare than other countries (2). Then, the involvement of the government through Medicare and Medicaid, as well as the ACA, has helped improve access to healthcare, but still more needs to be done. Even with these in place, millions of Americans still continue to struggle with access to healthcare. Again, this problem has been prevalent for decades, and yet there is still no solution to this. There are very clear reasons why these problems have such large effects on the lives of many

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The annual cost of healthcare in the United States of America in the year of 2015 was 3.2 trillion, or 9,990 per person, however, 1 billion from the total National Healthcare Expenditure was towards hospitals, Medicaid, and approximately 2 billion on Medicare. (www.cms.gov.) There are healthcare policies in place and being formulated to adhere to the issue of the continuous growth of the National HealthCare, but, there are some that add onto the issue. For example, The Affordable Care Act(ACA), signed by president Barack Obama on march 3, 2010 has been perceived in two different lights, one being that the ACA is the reason why the National Healthcare expenditure has increased. One of the primary goals of the ACA is to “Make affordable health insurance available to more people” (Healthcare.gov).

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“In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable” (Kevin Alan Lee 2011). Being a doctor is mean to cure diseases unconditionally. However, the healthcare system in the United States today has always been the top concern in every family and individual. As compared to most of other countries, their governments provide free health care to their citizens at any time (Sicko). We as one of the most powerful countries seems far left behind that people are still suffering from high medical expenses and are still fighting over a basic need of being covered with free health care.

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46.8 million Americans were reported as uninsured in 2013, which equivocates to one sixth of the population. Those without insurance have revealed that they risk “more problems getting care, are diagnosed at later disease stages, and get less therapeutic care” (National Health Care Disparities Report) and those insured risk losing their insurance. Inadequately covered citizens are often working-class individuals who simply cannot receive insurance due to uncontrollable inconveniences and therefore jeopardize having medical coverage. In these instances, Americans have a chance of being diagnosed with diseases that they had no opportunity to prevent or could not diagnose them at an early stage of the illness. Patients have suffered unnecessarily due to lack of health care, and “18,000 Americans die every year because they don't have health insurance” (PNHP).

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