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RUNNING HEAD: ISSUES ON HEALTHCARE IN THE UNITED STATES

Liliana Meraz

Issues on Healthcare in the United States

University of Texas at El Paso

November 21, 2017

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ISSUES ON HEALTHCARE IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

The United States has one of the worst and most expensive health cares in the world, on top of

that not everyone is properly insured and if you are middleclass you will be fined if you do not have an

insurance, and if you are too poor in some states you might not even get any insurance. Some of the

people that might not have insurance are the ones changing jobs and the ones that dont have enough to

pay for it.

The bills in the hospitals are becoming exaggerated and it is almost impossible to evade them.

With the medicalization from the moment you were brought to birth till the moment you die you might

have to get to a hospital any time, this meaning that you will have to use money for it. With the corruption

of the doctors now a day, In the moment of birth they are making women have cesarean births just to

charge more money not caring of what risk they are imposing on the mother and the child. They are also

doing this for peoples deaths, making them go through a lot of procedures they didnt had to go through

just to get more money.

We must educate ourselves to not be fooled by this people, we need to learn and spread the

knowledge about healthcare specially in the lower socioeconomic levels.

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ISSUES ON HEALTHCARE IN THE UNITED STATES

Now that President Trump has decided to mention a lot the issue of health insurance in the United States,

more people are beginning to wonder what is going on. Many people dont know about this, but the

United States has the most expensive and poor medical care. This meaning that we are paying a lot of

money to get bad medical care and most people cant afford it. There is a problem, but is universal

healthcare or lets say, Obama Care the solution?

The Healthcare in the United States is expensive, and we are certainly not getting what we pay

for, compared to other countries. Since health care was so

Health Expenditures per capita
expensive in the United States, many people decided not to
AUS $3,800
buy it or became uninsured when they left work to join

another work, not to mention that some people couldnt CAN $4,522

even afford it (Skinner, 2008). In a census made in 2006, it

FRA $4,118
was shown that at least thirty-two million people didnt
GER $4,495
have health insurance (Skinner, 2008). If you think about it,

that is a lot of people. Now, every time you go to urgent NETH $5,099

care in a hospital, the visit is at least around two- thousand

NZ $3,182
dollars but if you have to get surgery it is around 100,000
NOR $5,669
dollars depending on what it is, this is how people usually

get in medical debt. These facts, except for the exaggerated SWE $3,182

medical bill ones are from eleven years ago, now there is a
SWIZ $5,643
hybrid of a universal care, which is Obama Care.
UK $3,405
The United States is falling behind the other
US $8,508
industrialized countries with their healthcare. Like

mentioned before, they spend too much on their healthcare

while not so much people have it, but there was a sense of hope with the Affordable Care Act, according

to the studies it "could further encourage more affordable access and more efficient organization and
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ISSUES ON HEALTHCARE IN THE UNITED STATES

delivery of healthcare," (Medical Economics, 2014). There was a study comparing the United States to

eleven more countries to determine their health expenditure per capita in which the United States ended

on the last place. The only difference from the United States and the other eleven countries was that the

United States didnt had universal healthcare ( Medical Economics, 2014).

From the 1930s to today we have been using the hospitals more frequently. Almost ninety-nine

percent of child births are performed in a hospital, when it usually was performed by a midwife (Hall,

2017). Birth today has become more expensive, medicalized and dehumanizing. Expensive because

pregnancy and birth were marked as the most expensive conditions to be in by the Medicaid which cost

them ten thousand dollars per vaginal birth and twenty thousand per cesarean, for private insurers it costs

twenty-thousand per vaginal birth and thirty-thousand per cesarean and if you want to pay it yourself, it

would be thirty-thousand dollars per vaginal birth and fifty thousand per cesarean (Hall, 2017). It is pretty

expensive to be a normal function that most humans do at certain points of their life. Sometimes doctors

make women have cesarean births despite most of them wanting it vaginally. Despite most women want

vaginal births thirty-two percent of them end up having their kid through a cesarean , even though

medical intervention might have higher chances of the death of a child during birth (Hall, 2017). The

increased infant and maternal rates are due to over medicalization, or the greed of the doctors wanting to

take more money in their pockets by forcing a woman to have a cesarean birth when knowing a vaginal

birth is safer. Now, one dies just as one was delivered in this corrupt world, a bunch of unwanted and

unnecessary procedures done to you in the hope of remaining alive and incredible amount of money in

debt. Death is just as medicalized as a birth. Like birth, one died at home and that was it until the 1950s

where death became medicalized (Hall, 2017). According to Medicare the costs of the last year of life of

someone is forty-thousand dollars while the last hundred and eighty days of someone with cancer cost

eighteen thousand six hundred dollars (Hall, 2017). They try to prolong the time a terminal patient is alive

even though it is shown that they have a lower quality of life while they are alive in those weeks, most of
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ISSUES ON HEALTHCARE IN THE UNITED STATES

them would rather die at home than in a hospital but only twenty-five percent can get to do that (Hall,

2017).

Universal health care is usually one of the solutions people think of when it comes to getting

everyone affordable health care, but what is it exactly? Universal healthcare is a form of medical

insurance provided to all the citizens of the country (Rich, 2017). It was until 2010 that the United States

began to get something similar to universal health care, which was Obama Care. There had been various

attempts before done by Theodore Roosevelt for universal healthcare, but people just didnt wanted to

pass the law (Rich, 2017). There is still a lot of controversy with the Obama Care since most people are

being forced into it. The people affected by Obama Care are the middle class, because if they didnt had

insurance before, now, they are being forced to buy one or they will be fined (Romano, 2014). Although

they might have options that seem affordable, they end up confusing you even more, such as the bronze

plan that they have which is two dollars and twenty cents a month but with a deductible of six thousand

dollars a year or the silver plan which is a hundred and thirty a month and nine-hundred dollars as a

deductible (Romano, 2014). This idea only sounds good on paper but in real life it seems to be a little

more complicated. It might be possible to have a good universal healthcare in the United States, but for

that we would have to work on it as a society (Rashford, 2007). This means that we should support more

people with lower socioeconomic backgrounds. People from other congregations, such as churches and

small shops should also help educate people in healthcare (Maxwell, 2016).

It is more important for the young people of the United States to understand how important

healthcare is because sooner or later they will need it and need to know how it works. It is important to

know about this because we do not want the government to babysit us and take advantage over us. Like

Kennedy once said Ask not what can your country do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

This meaning that we have to take a word in this issue, because we will soon depend on it.
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ISSUES ON HEALTHCARE IN THE UNITED STATES

References

Hall, L. (2017). Rehumanizing Birth and Death in America. Society, 54(3), 226-237.

Maxwell, R. (2016, August 1). Singh, Prabhjot. Dying and Living in the Neighborhood: A Street-

Level View of America's Healthcare Promise. Library Journal, 141(13), 115. Retrieved from http://0-

go.galegroup.com.lib.utep.edu/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=txshracd2603&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA

459805117&asid=470b468b7472481283e7fd6e3fe3a33d

Rashford, M. (2007). A universal healthcare system: is it right for the United States?. Nursing

Forum, 42(1), 3-11.

Rich, A. A. (2017). Universal health care. Points Of View

Romano, M. (2014, March 26). Obamacare is not universal health care. Retrieved November 21,

2017, from http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bs-ed-obamacare-medicare-20140326-story.html

Skinner, B. J. (2008). REALITIES OF HEALTH POLICY IN NORTH AMERICA:

GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION. Economic Affairs, 28(4), 10-15.

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0270.2008.00878.x