Notes

Health Care Reform - WHY ARE FOLKS So UPSET?
Why are Americans so excited about health care reform? Statements such as for example "don't touch my Medicare" or "everyone should have access to advanced health care irrespective of cost" are in my opinion uninformed and visceral responses that indicate a poor understanding of our health and wellness 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 already reached what some refer to as an emergency stage. Let's make an effort to take some 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 consider the benefits and drawbacks of the Obama administration healthcare reform proposals and let's look at the concepts help with by the Republicans?

Access to advanced health care services is something we can all agree would be a good thing because of this country. Experiencing a significant illness is among life's major challenges and to face it without the means to pay for it is positively frightening. But as we shall see, after we know the facts, we shall discover that achieving this goal will not be easy without our individual contribution.

These are the themes I am going to touch on to try to make some sense out of what's happening to American health care and the steps we are able to personally take to make things better.

A recent history of American healthcare - what has driven the expenses so high?
Key elements of the Obama health care plan
The Republican view of health care - free market competition
Universal access to state of the art health care - a worthy goal however, not easy to achieve
what can we do?
First, let's get a little historical perspective on American health care. This is not designed to be an exhausted look into that history but it gives us an appreciation of how 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. For the reason that war, dated tactics and the carnage inflicted by modern weapons of the era combined to cause ghastly results. Not generally known is that almost all of the deaths on both sides of that 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 subjected to wound care, related surgeries and/or amputations of the affected limbs which often led to the onset of massive infection. So you might survive a battle wound and then die as a result of health care providers who although well-intentioned, their interventions were often quite lethal. High death tolls can even be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases in a time when no antibiotics existed. In total something similar to 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 some additional perspective also to bring us up to newer times. After the civil war there have been steady improvements in American medicine in both understanding and treatment of certain diseases, new surgical techniques and in physician education and training. But 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 were not yet open to handle serious illnesses. Nearly all deaths remained the result of untreatable conditions such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever and measles and/or related complications. personal care Doctors were increasingly alert to heart and vascular conditions, and cancer but they had almost nothing with which to take care of these conditions.
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