U.S. Health Care

The United States Health Care system is rated 37th in the world in terms of quality and fairness. Despite the fact that we spend far more on healthcare than other wealthy nations, we are unable to provide universal health care to our citizens, something which countries such as Japan, Germany, Great Britain, and Taiwan can do. When you look at the systems in place in these countries, the word that comes to mind for Americans is socialism. The fear or resentment of socialism, and therefore embracement of capitalism, keeps Americans very close minded in regards to setting up a universal healthcare system. In Great Britain, health care is paid for completely through tax revenue, and as a result citizens have no medical bills or bankruptcy. In Japan, the country with the longest healthy life expectancy and lowest infant mortality rate, they are able to cover all their citizens while spending half of what the United States does. A key reason for this is that they have a price regulation, and they negotiate these prices and have them set as standards. This prevents drug and insurance companies from making too much profit. In America, there is no negotiations or price regulations, and as a result medical bills and prescription drugs are ridiculously expensive. Insurance companies are unable to make profits in Japan, Germany, and Taiwan, something which American insurance companies do in gross fashion. The obsession with market and profit was made the American health care system dehumanized, denying the basic human right of health care to its citizens.
My girlfriend’s brother passed away when he was 16, about 15 years ago. He had Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer, and received extensive medical treatments. Her parents are Irish immigrants, her dad making money doing manual labor such as roofing, and her mom making money anyway she could, babysitting or caring for elderly. His medical bills were ridiculously expensive, and today her parents are in massive debt. My girlfriend is worried that this debt will be passed on to her if her parents don't pay it off, but I’m not sure about that.
To improve healthcare in America, I would model the Taiwanese approach of taking the best part of other country’s healthcare system to create a completely favorable system. To do this, the government must get rid of for profit insurance companies, and set up a national insurance system in which everyone must pay. The rich in America will not have the option of opting out of this national insurance, and in fact I think it would be beneficial to increase the tax rate on those who make significantly more than the rest of the population. Those who cannot afford to pay into this national insurance will be covered by the government. No doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, or drug companies can be privatized, and prices must be negotiated before hand and set as a standard.
If I had the financial resources, the three health issues I would try to fix is first, the American health care system as a whole. Families should not be financially crippled and punished because someone in the family got sick. It is an uncontrollable thing, and we have the money to fix the system. Then I would focus my research into the effects mass product of food, such as using hormones, preservatives, and low quality meat. I believe that there is a direct correlation between the rising rates of colon and rectal cancer in young males, and the rise of the mass production of the food industry. Third I would focus my attention on Flint, Michigan. The governor chose to switch the water which passed through the town’s lead pipes from lake water to river water. However, the governor did not think to ask or research the consequences of using river water with lead pipes. It turns out that it dissolves the lead, and the water which passed through these pipes into the homes of the Flint residents was poisoned with lead. This was the government directly poisoning there own people, with young children suffering permanent brain damage from drinking the contaminated water. It is an atrocity and one that has not been solved despite it happening almost 3 years ago, with the new pipes not set to be finished until 2020.
There are many significant issues with American health care. In order to improve it, we must look at what our peers are doing and having success with, and then look to model their approach and even build on it. The closed minded approach and mentality of capitalism and free market cannot apply to the health care system, in which every human deserves the basic right to health care. For the richest nation in the history of the world to be so far behind our contemporaries in such a crucial field is very concerning, and I hope to see progressive change in my lifetime toward a universal, single payer system.