Question

Explain ONE major problem in the US health care that has been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Answer 1

1. Explain ONE major problem in the US health care that has been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Ans:-

There are many major problems affected the US health care system that has been exposed by the COVID-19.

The international response to the novel coronavirus has laid this bare: America was less prepared for a pandemic than countries with universal health systems.

There is a real concern that Americans, with a high uninsured rate and high out-of-pocket costs compared to the rest of the world, won’t seek care because of the costs. Before the crisis even began, the United States had fewer doctors and fewer hospital beds per capita than most other developed countries. The rollout of Covid-19 testing has been patchy, reliant on a mix of government and private labs to scale up the capacity to perform the tens of thousands of tests that will be necessary.

People need to go to the doctor and get checked if they have Covid-19 symptoms, yet Americans may avoid medical care, even for serious conditions, because of the costs. Hospitals will need rooms for the people who require close monitoring in a clinical setting, and ICU beds and ventilators for patients who take a turn for the worse and require mechanical support to keep their bodies functioning.

But none of those units is sitting empty right now they already have non-coronavirus patients who need them and will continue to need them through the crisis. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday that nearly 80 per cent of New York City’s intensive care units were already filled, even with the Covid-19 outbreak still expanding.

By any of these metrics on pandemic preparedness, America trails most of the rest of the developed world.

“The U.S. performs worse than average among similarly large and wealthy countries across nearly all measures of preparedness for a pandemic,”

“The coronavirus outbreak is already exposing inefficiencies and inequities in our health system, and it is likely to put much more strain on the system in the coming weeks.”

And the slow start of testing in the US is only going to exacerbate those problems.

Testing is important not only because it gets people diagnosed and on appropriate treatment if they do have an infection. It also establishes how widespread a virus actually is. Experts know the size of the problem, they know the rate at which people are being hospitalized or dying, and they can follow its movements. That leads to a more informed response.

But the United States has faltered in rolling out coronavirus tests, putting us far behind our economic peers in tracing the outbreak. A manufacturing problem with the test kits that were initially sent out in the field, and a delay in approving commercial tests, set the nation back in stopping or slowing down Covid-19.

“The testing failure is putting additional strain on our already challenged health system,” Cox said. “The combination of all of these factors will make the U.S. worse off than similar countries.”

Universal health care is not a perfect treatment for emergencies like this. Italy has a universal health care system, a federalized national health insurance program similar to Canada’s, but an uncontained outbreak has still forced the country to lock itself down as cases and deaths continue to pile up.

Nevertheless, other countries are still generally better prepared for a pandemic than the US is, and we are seeing right now the consequences of that gap.

For the time being, US politicians are proposing to make American health care more like these other nations: making carefree or cheap at the point of service, either by having the government cover more of the cost or by mandating private insurers cover services related to the outbreak.

They are, however, only a temporary patch on these structural problems.

Understaffed hospitals, understocked test kits and high medical costs have put a strain on the U.S.’ strategy to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak.

The coronavirus pandemic, which has fueled widespread speculation about potential long-term changes to American life, is already causing one important shift: It has accelerated moves to restructure how basic medical care is provided and paid for in the U.S.

Doctor groups and insurers say in just the last month, there’s been a dramatic surge of interest in large-scale changes in the way primary care doctors are paid, an overhaul that policy experts have envisioned for decades.

Driving the urgency is a dramatic drop-off in patient visits to primary care practices over the last month as the coronavirus spread and patients stayed away from the doctor’s office, fearful of getting ill.

Primary care doctors have seen a big uptick in telehealth visits a move widely hailed by public health experts. However, the fees for these services are often lower than for office visits.

Many physician practices have seen in-person patient visits drop 50% or even 75%. That has left physicians struggling to stay afloat and forced growing numbers to consider laying off staff or even closing their doors. Nearly 8 in 10 primary care clinicians in one recent survey reported their practice is under “severe” or “close to severe” strain due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

To deal with that problem, the federal Medicare program and some commercial health plans have begun offering advance payments to medical providers, effectively giving physicians a lump sum based on an estimate of how much they would expect to collect from seeing a normal stream of patients.

The threat of the new virus comes at an already busy time for most U.S. hospitals. Another serious respiratory illness, the seasonal flu, is at its peak in the United States, with more than 26 million cases and many hospitals stretched thin. A larger spread of the new virus across the U.S. could overwhelm emergency rooms and quickly cause supply shortages of some crucial medical supplies, according to half a dozen interviews with doctors, U.S. hospitals and health systems.

How the Covid-19 pandemic will leave its mark on US health care

From hospital closures to the rise of telehealth, five ways the system is already transforming.

The flaws in America’s health system have been evident for decades to anyone who cared to look, but the coronavirus pandemic has left no more room for doubt: People will die because the US refuses to treat health care as a public good and a universal right. They already are.

Our decentralized system, with independent providers and many different payers, was not nimble in responding to this stealthy pathogen. These problems weren’t the only reason more than half a million people in the United States have contracted Covid-19 and tens of thousands have died. But America was particularly fertile ground for a virus to run wild.

Only in America could a man and daughter placed under mandatory government quarantine then be hit with a $4,000 hospital bill. Only in America could somebody without health insurance a situation, all on its own, foreign to other rich countries receive a bill for Covid-19 treatment that tops $30,000. Only in America would a dying patient ask in his final breaths who will pay for the care that could not prevent his death. The US is the richest country in the world, and yet millions are uninsured or have insufficient benefits. It has fewer hospital beds, doctors, and nurses per capita than its economic peers.

Some hospitals will probably close. A lot of primary care doctors could also be in trouble.

Hospitals of every type private and public, urban and rural are paying a heavy price to Covid-19. Not only are they trying to keep their patients and doctors healthy despite a shortage of supplies, but many have cancelled or postponed elective surgeries, such as heart surgery or even cancer treatments. Those procedures typically account for much of their annual revenue, and without it, hospitals are laying off staff (temporarily, for now) to keep afloat.

Rural hospitals especially depend on outpatient services for much of their revenue about three-quarters of it on average, according to a Chartis Center on Rural Health analysis. Most of those services are now on hold. Making matters worse, hospitals in rural communities generally had only a month’s worth of cash on hand for a crisis like this and the extension of social distancing guidelines until at least the end of April will “increase the likelihood that we will see rural hospitals run out of cash,” the Chartis researchers wrote.

Before Covid-19 reached the US, one in four rural hospitals was already vulnerable to closure. Congress is funnelling tens of billions of dollars to hospitals, and elective surgeries will resume at some point. But it still might not be enough to save some of these institutions.

Telemedicine will finally go mainstream. The most obvious effect of the pandemic might paradoxically be the most mundane and the most significant. Telemedicine has struggled for years to realize its full potential, hindered by a combination of bad policies (limited Medicare coverage, states’ restrictions on practising across state lines) and patients’ attachment to the old-fashioned “laying on of hands” kind of medicine.

But as government officials have sought to keep otherwise healthy seniors away from doctor’s offices and hospitals where they might be exposed to the coronavirus contagion, telehealth has experienced a boom. Those visits surged by 50 per cent in March as social distancing went into full effect, and the total number of phone or video interactions is expected to exceed 1 billion total by year’s end. Estimates from 2019 had indicated only about one in 10 Americans were taking advantage of telehealth in the pre-pandemic era.

The US healthcare system is clearly broken.

While the number of coronavirus cases worldwide is about to hit one million, the number of people who have lost their lives has almost touched fifty thousand.

Outpacing all other countries in number of confirmed cases, the US has become a major hotspot for the coronavirus pandemic.

President Trump warned Americans to brace for a “rough two-week period” ahead as the White House released new model projections that there could be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US from Covid-19.

Some state governors most notably that of New York, have criticised the federal government and requested emergency assistance.

The governor and mayor of New York are complaining almost daily about the lack of bed capacity, the insufficient number of ventilators, and the limited number of healthcare employees.

The mayor of New York has emphasised the severity of the situation, claiming that he has only one week’s worth of medical supplies on hand.

In a daily press conference from White House, President Trump talks about the measures put in place. In particular, President Trump occasionally brings up the flaws in the US healthcare system. He even criticises state authorities, asking why they didn’t take precautions earlier.

There is obviously conflict between the federal government and state administrations. So, is the health system in the US, the merits of which trigger some of these spats, on the verge of a breakdown?

In the US, health becomes a major issue every election cycl. Every government changes its health policies with new approaches in every tenure.

Before Obamacare, there was no general and universal health insurance, but Obamacare aimed to provide everyone with at least one insurer, and thanks to the act, about 20 million people more were insured.

However, having stated that, Obamacare was a flawed system. President Trump tried to push through a new US health reform through the House of Representatives in 2017, which was rejected by the Senate. Thus, the health policy that Trump wanted to implement could not be carried out.

Now, President Trump says that they have a great healthcare plan with much lower premiums and bigger discounts than ‘Obamacare’ provided he is elected as president again in 2020.

But what are the facts when it comes to US healthcare? According to the American Hospitals Association, the total number of hospitals is 6,146, of which, 5,198 are 'community hospitals' defined as "nonfederal, short-term general, and other special hospitals".

The total staffed beds in the US amounts to 924,107 beds. The total expenses for hospitals is over $1 trillion.

The KFF states there are 1,005,295 doctors in the US.

The US Census shows that out of 164,000 healthcare professionals surveyed, 17 percent were born outside of the US, and five percent were not even US citizens.

According to the US Medical Association, there will be a shortage of 105,000 physicians in the US by 2030.

The US has begun its push to recruit doctors and medical personnel from abroad due to a shortage of trained specialists and the fact that the coronavirus has made the problems in the health system more transparent.

The US announced a “Visa update for medical professionals” issued by the Consular Affairs Department of State to inform potential recruits about gaining convenient access to a visa.

Now I'd like to move to a few recent examples of the healthcare system in action since the coronavirus pandemic to illustrate how the healthcare system is flawed in practice.

In California, a 17-year-old who had coronavirus wasn’t admitted to the hospital because he had no health insurance and died - although it is not yet confirmed whether Covid-19 was the cause of death.

In Florida, the cost of treatment for one uninsured Covid-19 patient was $34,927,43. In the latest report by FairHealth, there are shocking details about treatment costs that could increase to up to $73,000 for an uninsured Covid-19 patient.

If you are a Covid-19 patient and have insurance, the amount you will pay ranges between $9,000-20,000. There are 27 million uninsured people in the US. Among those, there are many US citizens who avoid doctors, even if they are ill, due to the fear of exorbitant bills.

According to IBISWorld, the market share of health and medical insurance measured by revenue is $1.1 trillion. We are talking about a market that makes a great deal of profit.

Many insurance companies in Washington DC have been working for a long time to get their way through lobbying Congress.

In a population of approximately 330 million people, the problems in the health system, which have been brought to the top of the agenda again with the outbreak of the coronavirus, must be resolved as soon as possible.

I can say that President Trump is putting up a great fight against coronavirus at the moment. As far as we can see, even though precautions were taken late at first, President Trump and his team have been providing every state with financial and moral support, some of which includes bringing the US National Guard into action and a stimulus package worth $2.2 trillion.

At the last press conference, President Trump said, “human lives first,” and that precautions would increase. The most important issue is that everyone should support each other to fight the coronavirus, regardless of their politics.

With the coronavirus outbreak, what has become clear for many countries, particularly the US, is that it is more significant to invest in human health first instead of spending trillions of dollars on other industries that are not as essential.