Health Care Made in America

One would imagine that the wealthiest, most powerful country on this Planet would be sufficiently invested in the well-being of its entire population to ensure that the most basic of health assurances be available to its most needy. Yet the fact is there are 45 million Americans with no health insurance, reliant on themselves to somehow stop-gap their needs for health care.

When at any time a family could be hit with a catastrophic health concern for which there is little help other than to beggar themselves in a desperate attempt to aid themselves.

The U.S. Congress, the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services have long studied the issue of universal availability to adequate health care for the American populace. But the health care industry in the United States and their insurers have too powerful a lobby to enable the lawmakers to make much headway.

And so public hospitals are hard put to provide a level of fundamental care for the ill and the health-struck, inadequately funded and fumbling.

And families without workplace health insurance pay exorbitant health-care insurance if they can afford it, to ensure that their vulnerable family members can have basic health care when required.

The World Health organization ranks the United States 37th in the world's health systems. As for avoidable mortality, the United States ranks 15th in the Commonwealth Fund's assessment of 19 industrialized countries. Not an enviable record for a wealthy country.

But the United States scorns universal health care programs and entitlements other than their own "uniquely American" dysfunction. They look at the plans in countries around the world, and disdain them for one reason or another. Canada's national health insurance program where the government pays private doctors isn't quite what the U.S. feels it wants.

And for certain American health professionals would never agree to a Scandinavian type plan where doctors are mostly salaried government employees, hospitals are government-operated and costs are carried by the federal government. That simply is not consonant with the free market system, the capitalist system that the United States' economy exemplifies.

Yet health care represents 16% of the GDP in the United States, far higher than most other industrialized democracies. The American system is costly, inefficient, ineffective, but it is "uniquely American".

Americans should think long and hard about the fact that populations in other developed industrial nations have longer life expectancies. And Americans deserve to have a health plan that would give them the comfort of knowing that should a medical emergency arise, it would not lead to their financial ruin.