Health Care System in the United States

Health Care System in the United States

Introduction

Health care delivery refers to the ways in which health care services are supplied to individuals who need or desire them. Although the actual process by which health care is delivered varies among countries, it is safe to say that in most countries, delivering health care is a complex process that requires participation and cooperation among many different people and organizations (Ellis, 2007). This complexity means that disputes about the best ways to deliver services are bound to arise, particularly in a country such as the United States that does not have a national system of health care but relies on a combination of private, public, and charitable programs. Although any system of health care delivery will have its own issues, much of this article focuses on comparisons between the U.S. method of health care delivery and the more nationalized or universal systems common in most of the rest of the industrialized world.

Discussion

Issues and debates concerning health care delivery generally center on several related issues: How do different models of health care delivery affect the quality of care delivered? How do the different models affect the costs of providing health care, and who should have the right to make decisions about the health care of other people? These questions about methods of health care delivery have their root in two facts: health is an issue about which most people care intensely, and providing optimal health care can be a very expensive proposition in the modern world. Two additional facts contribute to the rising costs of health care that are behind many of the most heated debates about health care delivery. One is that usually people do not pay directly for their health care: instead it is covered by general tax revenues, by specific government programs, or by private insurance (Martin & Martin, 2004). In any case, the amount an individual pays to support the system may have no direct relationship to the costs of services that he or she uses (although he/she may be required to make a copayment or pay for a small percentage of those services) and hence he or she does not know the actual costs of the services received and has little incentive to try to limit those costs. A second fact is that providing goods and services to the health care market can be an extremely lucrative business and thus an incentive exists to create and provide those goods and services independent of whether they contribute substantially to the presumed goal of improving the recipient's health.

As noted in a 2000 report by the World Health Organization (WHO), the medical and financial aspects of health care delivery cannot be separated. This is because much of what modern health care offers is far too expensive for most individuals to pay out of pocket and a single serious illness or accident could easily bankrupt the resources of a family if they had to pay all expenses themselves ...