America: Land of the Brave

As a few fellow students before have mentioned we are a country formed from a small minority that felt they were underserved and decided to fix their situation. We left an unpopular system and created a system that worked for the majority. Maybe not every portion of our government and its laws are perfect but for the most part they serve the needs of the majority. Our country is a very young one compared to most of the nations of the world and we have the opportunity to fix what is broken. Our health care system is not currently serving the needs of the majority.
I believe that similar to our tax system some of our citizens will end up paying a larger portion of the financial burden but it will serve a benefit to the whole.

Americans are offered a large amount of specialty care with little gatekeeping and even less primary care. In a study published in the Journal of Family Practice (Shi L., et al. Income inequality, Primary Care, and Health Indicators.), it was shown that primary care and life expectancy are positively correlated. Due to the lack of financial and insurance assistance many of our citizens are experiencing inappropriate access and using our emergency rooms and urgent care clinics as primary care facilities. These facilities are not meant for this and are collapsing under the volume of patients and the lack of professionals to care for them. To encourage physicians to focus on primary care as their specialty I think we could learn from the UK and pay our primary care physicians as much as the specialty physicians.

We could learn from Japan and the price fixing of its services and procedures. Hopefully, this could lower the amount of unnecessary and expensive defensive medicine over-testing. We also could learn a lot from Japan's highly employer based system. In Switzerland, there is a profit incentive for better quality of care. This not only insures that every citizen will receive care but that their physicians are dually motivated to provide quality care.

Americans need to be convinced that health care is a right not a privilege. As a society we tend to look at the uninsured as victims and we think we have the right to determine whether they are deserving of health care or not. Just as with our Constitution, we should pick and choose the best from each countries systems in order to create a more complete and working US health care system.