HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS

Comparison of U.S. healthcare system with a National Health Program and the difference in context of Functionalist and Conflict theories

Comparison of U.S. healthcare system with a National Health Program and the difference in context of Functionalist and Conflict theories

Introduction

This paper focuses on the comparison between the United States healthcare system and a system that use national healthcare programs in U.K. The difference is further analyzed from the perspective of Functionalist and Conflict theorist.

United States is the largest and most diverse society on the globe. It spends almost 2 trillion dollars every year on health care, which is one in every seven dollars in the economy. U.S is one of the very few nations where all its citizens do not have medical coverage. Although it spends heavily on per capita on health care, and it has the most advanced medical technology system in the world, still it is not the healthiest nation on earth. The system performs so poorly that it leaves 50 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered (Garson, 2010). For the majority of the Americans, health insurance is tied to their job, or they avail through government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. In U.S most often the greatest health care problem faced is that the health care professionals know how to provide best medical care and attention to the patients, but often they are not able to do so because the medical system gets in their way. From where the US economy is standing, their challenge is twofold: They must find a suitable way to cover all their people and secondly they must determine a way to get the best return from US$2 Trillion spent on health system.

The U.S Physicians then proposed a fundamental change in United States healthcare system. The creation of a comprehensive National Health Insurance Program would be a diversified and improved version of the healthcare system. It would cover every citizen for all necessary medical attention.

Comparison & Contrast

The economy of U.S spends greater share of its economy on health care than any other developed country, and yet all this spending has failed to buy citizens that one thing that health insurance is suppose to provide, and that is health security. Even those American citizens who have got healthcare coverage think that United States healthcare system is broken. There are various problems prevailing in this system and these are doubling with time. Tens of millions of people are uninsured; costs are sky high; and the bureaucracy is expanding. Majority of citizens and residents are availing job based medical insurance. They are locked up with their jobs for fear of losing the medical coverage. United States treats healthcare as a product and distributes and sells to those who can pay the price for it rather than distributing as a social service to those who are in need.

The American medical system is highly fragmented with complicated rules and regulations. There are bureaucracies that make a decision which patient can get ...