Should medicare and medicaid be reformed How so Explain fully - Essay Example

The health care system is really a terrible headache of America. Ironically, the greatest country in the world can not provide their citizens with affordable health care for decades and, more over, the situation is only getting worse. Unlike the most developed countries, the U.S. has never had a compulsory medical insurance system. Local medicine is funded mainly through private insurance companies - people or their employers voluntarily buy policy. The state does not interfere in this process.

Everything is regulated by the market. In theory, this corresponds to American ideals. But in practice, leads to the fact that medicine in America has become absurdly, mega expensive. Being for-profit businesses, insurance companies are focused on money earning. They can get profits denying sick people medical care, raising prices or paying less to doctors. The last option is unrealistic, since doctors are a very powerful cast - America is ruled by doctors and lawyers. Therefore, insurance companies are choosing raise cost of services and refuse compensations.

 Most people do not pay the doctors themselves, their treatment is covered by insurance. A huge percentage of Americans - 47 million people, roughly one in six, do not have insurance for many reasons. So, all citizens who are outside the health care system do not undergo medical examination, health surveys and preventive treatments - as a result visit doctors with advanced stages of diseases that are expensive to treat.  No wonder that having such fantastic ineffective expenditures on Medicare and Medicaid and quite more successful examples of the problem solution, like in Canada, the Government took a risk of reforms that split society.

It’s obvious that the state should strengthen its influence in the medical field. It has to introduce a more strict control over private hospitals’ prices of services. Health care should become more social. The range of state benefit packages for older Americans, poor families, children, pregnant and disabled should be expanded. Medical treatment in Canada, for example, is free. America needs to provide at least some government subsidy to help people with low income to cover the insurance.

 State hospitals doctors, who work with the poor population groups, need to receive a raise in salary, and those who use their services, need to undergo annual medical examinations free of charge. Requirements for insurers and employers are to be increased also. They have to seek opportunities to provide customers and employees with more effective plans with maximum coverage. And it would be great if America, in the course of time, adopts Canada methods where medical treatment is free at the expense of provincial budgets.