Notes

Health Care Reform - WHY ARE FOLKS So UPSET?
Why are Americans so excited about health care reform? Statements such as "don't touch my Medicare" or "everyone must have access to state of the art 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 how the health care system has reached what some refer to as a crisis stage. Let's make an effort to take a few of the emotion out of your debate by briefly examining how healthcare 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 benefits and drawbacks 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 healthcare services is something we can all agree would be a good thing because of this country. Experiencing a significant illness is one of life's major challenges and to face it without the means to shell out the dough is positively frightening. But once we shall see, after we know the facts, we will discover that achieving this goal will never be easy without our individual contribution.

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

A recently available history of American healthcare - what has driven the costs so high?
Important elements of the Obama healthcare plan
The Republican view of healthcare - free market competition
Universal access to advanced healthcare - a worthy goal however, not easy to achieve
what can we do?
First, let's get yourself 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 the way the healthcare system and our expectations for this developed. What drove costs higher and higher?

To begin, 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 a lot of the deaths on both sides of that war were not the result of actual combat but from what happened after a battlefield wound was inflicted. In the first place, 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 may survive a battle wound only to die as a result of medical care providers who although well-intentioned, their interventions were often quite lethal. High death tolls may also be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases in a period when no antibiotics existed. In total something like 600,000 deaths occurred from all causes, over 2% of the U.S. population at the time!

Let's skip to the first half of the 20th century for a few additional perspective and to bring us up to newer times. Following the civil war there were steady improvements in American medicine in both the understanding and treatment of certain diseases, new surgical techniques and in physician education and training. But for the most part the 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. Valley Cities Behavioral Health Care The majority of deaths remained the consequence of untreatable conditions such as for example tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever and measles and/or related complications. Doctors were increasingly alert to heart and vascular conditions, and cancer however they had almost nothing with which to treat these conditions.
Here's my website: https://kutti.place/place/valley-cities-behavioral-health-care-kent-us