Question

A foreign exchange student with limited knowledge of the U.S. health care system has ask you to explain the current health care reform movement in the U.S.. Please provide a summary of the key elements of the various reform initiatives and how they may impact the system. Since your audience does not have a knowledge or appreciation of the current system, a limited historical review/explanation may be needed.

Answer 1

The U.S. health care system is one of the largest and most complex in the entire world. The total health care spending in the U.S. is over $2.5 trillion per year and over $20,000 a year for a family of four.

Costs, Quality, and Access:

The reasons the costs I mentioned before is the fact that doctors have to go through a lot of training and education to help people as much as possible. Couple that now with ever increasing tuition costs necessary to educate a doctor who may one day serve you. But that's only one part of it all.

The drugs that doctors use to treat you are many times so expensive because it may take over a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to research, develop, approve, and market one single little drug found in the pill in a person's hand - a pill that may be used to treat chronic, or long-term, problems like obesity that's on the rise in the U.S. Such chronic conditions definitely raise the cost of health care for everyone.

Furthermore, the equipment and technologies used to diagnose and treat diseases are no less expensive to develop, buy, and train a doctor to use. An ever increasing aging population demanding access to good quality health care also strains the budgets of our system. And, of course, the desire for health insurance companies and health care providers to make money adds more to the equation here. All of these factors raise the costs associated with our health care system.

Until very recently, the amount of people without health insurance was quite staggering. Literally millions of people had no health insurance at all or were underinsured and thus did not get the quality of care they may have needed. That's because underinsured individuals may have policies that don't cover every type of service or may have ones with high out-of-pocket costs.

The very recent roll-out of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. 'Obamacare') has tried to improve the cost and access to quality health care, but it is far too early to be sure what impact this law has had on not only access to quality health care but decreasing the costs of our health care system on the nation as a whole. It may take years, if not decades, to fully appreciate this law's positive and negative impacts on society.