Health Care Reform Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 2

Health Care Reform - Essay Example Patients rely on doctors because they are trained professionals, with the knowledge to help and cure patients’ medical conditions. A key aspect that reinforces the power of physicians is America’s vision of progressive health care technology, and the requirement to exploit new measures and medications. The United States is far behind the rest of the developed countries in terms of their life expectancies, but the cost for health care is much higher than all of the other developed countries as well (Cassel, 2005). This is due to the reliance on new technologies, and this problem is two-fold: on the one hand, pharmaceutical companies and medical technology producers push new drugs, prescriptions, and medical technologies and incentives are given to doctors to utilize this new technology (Mechanic, 2006). This is also coupled with the fact that nowadays; the American public is becoming more interested in these new technologies due to information provided, through advertising and other means, by the pharmaceutical companies themselves. As medical technologies, procedures, and medications continue to advance, the cost of providing such care also advances. In the first half of the 20th century, medical care was paid for out-of-pocket, by the patients themselves. When costs continued to rise above what patients could pay, another capitalist scheme was developed to cash in on the commodity of health care; insurance. The first forms of insurance were basically managed by businesses. They offered insurance to their employees, as an added fringe benefit; sacrificing a proportion of their salary or wages (Porter & Teisberg, 2006). This pretty much remains true to this day; most Americans receive their health care insurance from their employers. A growing problem in the uninsured population also exists in the waiting period that has been assigned to most business insurance programs; for a short period of time many employees and there families remain uninsured (Porter &