HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA
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There seems to be a struggle in America among health care providers who work to prevent disease or cure it. Some focus on making the ill well. Other health care providers see their priority as the bottom line. The health care problem in America is serious. Yet, it has little to do with medical and scientific knowledge and discoveries. We are proud to find new medications, drugs for the average American. However, the problem is one of cost and expense. Some European nations provide general national health care. America is serviced by both for-profit as well as non-profit organizations. They vary in the types and even quality of service. Most importantly, they vary in the cost and fees they can (and do) charge their patients. What is perhaps most important to this discussion about difficult choices that so-called "good people" have to make is the cost of insurance. Even with insurance, the specter of expensive co-payments as well as denial of services by some insurers. Pharmaceutical companies are making big bucks, U.S. doctors are some of the highest paid, fancy new technologies are being sold that purportedly do miraculous things, the hospitals are getting their cut and the insurance companies keep raising their costs, so surely all is swell. Not really. According to the N.Y Times there are '60 million uninsured during a year (May 13)' (Engler 2003 1). All too often we read about court cases, even deaths to patients denied coverage by their i
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ility, or who is forced to deny a procedure knowing the insurer will not cover it. The moral dilemma here is clear-cut. Who comes first, the doctor's income- and his stranding within the health care provider which gives him a majority of his income, or the patient? There is now even the question of time spent with each patient. Many doctors are literally forced to see a certain number of patients each day. That limits the patient's exposure to the doctor. We now have a very unusual new "practice": some doctors now charge an annual fee. It is not a low dollar amount, either. This fee gives their patients better entry to the doctor. The doctor now can spend more time. If you can pay the fee, you get the time. If you cannot, then you are forced into crowded doctors' waiting rooms.
Individual versus community. Kidder (19) asks this question in his example of potential AIDS-contaminated blood transfusion: "What should he tell, and to whom should he tell it?" The moral dilemma is far worse when a doctor or health practitioner has top tell a patient he cannot be treated because he is uninsured. Or, he is sent to a second-rate institution where they "accept" uninsured patients. Here the moral dilemma is simple: How can a practicing
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Approximate Word count = 1949
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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