Analysis of U.S. Health Care System Introduction

The U.S. health care system followed the basic Western model of development, with a reliance on individual providers for most health care. Nurses were a development of the 19th century, along with hospitals, while the concept of insurance coverage for health care was a development of the 20th century. For the most part, the emphasis in this analysis is on the development of health care during the 20th century in the United States.

According to Andrews (1995), physicians were the supreme economic power in the health field during the early part of the 20th century. Individuals did not think of hospitals as a regular or standard part of their health care; most women, for example, had their children at home attended only by physicians, midwives, or nurses. Hospitals were repositories for the dying and the incurable. Most people did not want to enter them.

However, there were some beginnings of the powerful insurance/hospital coalition at that time. The major railroads actually provided medical coverage for their workers beginning in

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many of the selfemployed, and millions of children, lack adequate coverage and, therefore, realistically lack access to important health care services. Unsolved Problems or Issues There is controversy about the extent of the problems in the American health care system. There are those who believe that it is currently in crisis, or headed for a complete breakdown, while others believe that only adjustments are needed to finetune the system. There are also a variety of explanations for problems within the health care system, including the capitalist focus, government intervention, the emphasis on highcost hightechnology, health care lobbying, overuse of medical services, the high cost of medical education, and the glut of medical specialists (Wekesser, 1994). What are some of the current issues within the system? Probably the most striking unresolved problem is the failure of the health care system to institute effective prevention measures that would reduce the death rate for some of the more common causes of death. In the attached chart, the real causes of death from such things as heart disease and cancer are listed as including the overuse of alcohol, use of tobacco and drugs, firearms, and dietinactivity patter
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