National Health Care: Solution to a Brighter Tomorrow?

National Health care is a system in which direct provision of health care and other services given by the government is not required because within the system, every resident of a geographic area is mandated to have health insurance. Sounds pretty great, don't you agree? It ensures the health of all citizens and benefits the entire nation economically because we'll all have to spend less on health care if it's a set amount.

"In market-based systems...the mandate is coupled with a private insurance market. In government the mandate is coupled with a government agency that pays for a wide range of health benefits" (Wikipedia, 14 May 2007).

There are a lot of countries worldwide that use this system of national health care: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom to name a few.

Although this is such a widespread and growing idea, the United States fails to recognize the importance of such an implementation on our current system. The reason is simple: they haven't come up with an ideal plan for opperating it. Sure, it's a good idea, and it would definitely be a nice thing for people who are sick and just need a simple procedure or treatment to be able to go in scotch free and come out feeling fine. However, what about the people who need major surgery? Triple-bipass? A heart, or lung, or liver transplant? What happens to them? I'll tell you: they get put on a waiting list, and might just die in the process of signing up.

Patient: "Oh, I need a new liver. This one isn't working, and I think I could die any second"
Doctor: "That's too bad... Just put your name on the waiting list among the others and we'll see when we can get to you"

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like such a great scenario.

The idea itself, and the system works. And it could potentially work for a place like the United States, but there's no way we could do it any time soon, just because of our current system and our government. Their solution for everything is to throw money at it. Go deeper into debt. More funding. Etc.

What happens to the medical students who realize that because national health care is in effect, that they only get a certain amount of money, and they need to make the most of it. People are going to stop trying to develop new medicines. They'll want patients to keep coming in for old ones that don't work as well so that they make more money. What happens when they all realize that it's not worth going the extra mile to treat people? They're all going to be about the money. Not your health. This is where a nationalized health care plan would go totally wrong in my opinion, which is why it needs to be handled very seriously. I just think that nationalized health care is going to lead to poor performance on our physicians parts.

Several states are already implementing nationalized systems for semi-national health care: California, Maine, Pennsylvania and Vermont are a few of them.

So for now, we can hope that some day the United States can adapt some system that relates to the idea of nationalized health care, but I truely think that it's not a very likely outcome, and it would be close to impossible for us to actually pull off. Accurately. Something would go horribly wrong, and I think the ultimate outcome would be chaotic.

It's a nice idea, and I'm a lot of other countries use it. As for the United States, I might have to laugh a bit at that idea. (heh)