How To Teach Health Care Better Than Anyone Else

Why are Americans so excited about health care reform? Statements such as “don’t touch my Medicare” or “everyone should have access to state of the art health care irrespective of cost” are in my estimation uninformed and visceral responses that indicate an unhealthy understanding of our health care system’s history, its current and future resources and the funding challenges that America faces in the years ahead. Health Care Guide While we all wonder how the health care system has already reached what some refer to as a crisis stage. Let’s try 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 healthcare. With that as a foundation let’s consider the pros and cons of the Obama administration health care reform proposals and let’s look at the concepts help with by the Republicans?

Access to advanced healthcare services is something we can all agree will be a good thing for this country. Experiencing a serious illness is one of life’s major challenges also 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 find that achieving this goal will not be easy without our individual contribution.

These are the themes I will touch on to try to make some sense out of what is happening to American healthcare and the steps we can personally try make things better.

A recently available history of American health care – what has driven the expenses so high?
Key elements of the Obama health care plan
The Republican view of healthcare – free market competition
Universal access to state of the art health care – a worthy goal but 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 consider that history but it will give us an appreciation of the way the healthcare system and our expectations for it developed. What drove costs higher and higher?

To begin with, let’s turn to the American civil war. In that war, dated tactics and the carnage inflicted by modern weapons of the era combined to cause ghastly results. Not generally known is that the majority of the deaths on both sides of this war were not the result of actual combat but to 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 subjected to wound care, related surgeries and/or amputations of the affected limbs which often resulted in the onset of massive infection. So you might survive a battle wound only to die at the hands of medical care providers who although well-intentioned, their interventions were often quite lethal. High death tolls can be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases in a period when no antibiotics existed. Altogether something like 600,000 deaths occurred from all causes, over 2% of the U.S. population at the time!

Let’s skip to the initial 1 / 2 of the 20th century for a few additional perspective and to bring us up to newer times. Following 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 can 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 available to handle serious illnesses. 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 take care of these conditions.