Why It's Not Easy To Change

Americans can easily point out the negatives qualities of the US Healthcare System. Furthermore, the high cost and, ironically, poorer outcomes are even obvious to other countries. As we discussed in lecture, health care spending is at an astronomical high of 17.1% of the national GDP. Yet, the US health system ranks 37^th in the world by WHO, which is way behind countries such as France, Germany, and Japan. It is clear we need to restructure the healthcare design. Before taking this course, I naively believed that such reform would be relatively easy to make by modeling another country’s healthcare system. After all, I believed it would be better to model off a successful system rather than blindly adjusting our current failing system towards something unknown and untested. In fact, we are already spending so much changing Medicare and Medicaid that it may save more money, and lead to better health outcomes, in the long term to restructure our healthcare system off a proven model. For a long time, I believed that this would be a great solution; however, my perspective has greatly changed through this course.

Through the Global Healthcare Presentations, I learned that even though many of the European countries had similar health insurance and healthcare ideas, their ways of delivering it and the challenges of each were unique to their culture. Therefore, the US would simply not be able to copy another country’s healthcare system. Some of the unique problems the US faces include the uneven health insurance coverage and rising premiums, the growing usage of expensive new medical technologies and prescription drugs, and our individualistic mindsets. These are all problems that we have discussed in lecture or during discussions, but there are so many more interesting reasons that I would like to talk about. Two of these are the pay of healthcare providers and the US political system.  

A major reason I believe that hinders healthcare reform in the US is healthcare providers’ salaries. Compared to healthcare providers in the high performing countries, the US salaries are much greater. While this is good for us, I believe it plays a role in the high health insurance costs and the dearth of primary care physicians in the US. In fact, the US has fewer physicians per capita; most are overspecialized and thus neglect primary and preventive care.

I also believe that the US political infrastructure, which is inefficient in itself, plays a large role as to why healthcare in the US is so stagnant. Just passing one healthcare bill through the Supreme Court takes years; for example, the pharmacy provider status bill has been taking years, and was just reintroduced in 2015. This system wastes time, resources, and money. Most importantly, this leads to increasing healthcare costs with poorer outcomes as necessary changes are not being made at a timely rate.

These are two other points that I believe are also playing a major role in our current healthcare system crisis. This course has made me much more aware of what is going on globally in regards to healthcare, and I have realized that our current problems are deeply rooted in American culture. I have learned a lot from this course, and my perspective regarding how the US should go about changing the healthcare system has definitely changed as a result.