The Secret Guide To Health Care

 

Why are Americans so excited about health care reform? Statements such as "don't touch my Medicare" or "everyone must have access to advanced health care regardless of cost" are in my opinion uninformed and visceral responses that indicate a poor understanding of our health care system's history, its current and future resources and the funding challenges that America faces in the years ahead. While we all wonder the way the health care system has reached what some refer to as an emergency stage. Let's try to take a number of the emotion out from the debate by briefly examining how health care in this country emerged and how which 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 health care reform proposals and let's look at the concepts help with by the Republicans?

Access to state of the art health care services is something we are able to all agree will be a good thing for this country. Experiencing a significant illness is among life's major challenges also to face it without the means to pay for it is positively frightening. But as we shall see, after we know the facts, we will find that achieving this goal will never be easy without our individual contribution.

These are the themes I am going to touch on to make an effort to make some sense out of what is happening to American health care and the steps we can personally try make things better.

A recent history of American healthcare - what has driven the costs so high?
Key elements of the Obama healthcare plan
The Republican view of healthcare - free market competition
Universal access to state of the art healthcare - a worthy goal but not easy to achieve
what can we do?
First, let's get yourself a little historical perspective on American healthcare. This is not designed to be an exhausted consider that history but it gives us an appreciation of the way the healthcare system and our expectations for this developed. What drove costs higher and higher?

To begin with, let's turn to the American civil war. In that war, dated tactics and the carnage inflicted by modern weapons of the era combined to cause ghastly results.healthy lifestyle tips Not generally known is that almost all of the deaths on both sides of this war were not the consequence of actual combat but to what happened following a battlefield wound was inflicted. To begin with, evacuation of the wounded moved at a snail's pace and this caused severe delays in treating the wounded. Secondly, many wounds were put through wound care, related surgeries and/or amputations of the affected limbs and this often resulted in the onset of massive infection. So you might survive a battle wound only to die at the hands of medical care providers who although well-intentioned, their interventions were often quite lethal. High death tolls can be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases in a time when no antibiotics existed. Altogether something like 600,000 deaths occurred from all causes, over 2% of the U.S. population at the time!

Let's skip to the initial half of the 20th century for a few additional perspective also to bring us up to more modern times. Following the civil war there have been steady improvements in American medicine in both the understanding and treatment of certain diseases, new surgical techniques and in physician education and training. But also for the most part the very best that doctors could offer their patients was a "wait and see" approach. Medicine could handle bone fractures and increasingly attempt risky surgeries (now largely performed in sterile surgical environments) but medicines weren't yet open to handle serious illnesses. Nearly all deaths remained the consequence of untreatable conditions such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever and measles and/or related complications. Doctors were increasingly alert to heart and vascular conditions, and cancer however they had next to nothing with which to take care of these conditions.