Health Care for All Americans Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Health Care for All Americans - Essay Example With this respect, this paper will critically expound on the basic reasons as to why health care should be to all Americans. Across America, there are many people from one side struggling to make both ends meet and on the other coping with a broken health care system. In addition, there are those who live completely without health care, others are striving to pay the hiking costs of Medicare, and more of them are joining the ranks of those uninsured. Agreeably, this is a shocking and terrible situation for super power like America! This growing health care crisis is not just a problem that should worry only the affected, but also places an endangering burden to the rest of the Americans as well. Furthermore, due to economic issues, small businesses are finding it difficult to insure their employees due to competitive and skyrocketing cost of insurance premiums. Most worrisome, much of the funds spend on health care services disappears through inefficiency and massive waste. Even Unit ed States tops the globe in health care expenditures (Collins 15). The administrative costs swallow 1 dollar out of every 4 dollars set aside for health care needs. That is not all, medical errors result to loss of lives of 100,000 Americans every year. With that follows a $100 billion dollar loss via drug prescription errors alone. Causes of Health Care Disparities in America Factors leading to health care disparities in the US vary and at the same time interrelate. Different groups have different underlying rates of illness due to environmental factors, generic predisposition, or lifestyle choices. They express different types of care-seeking behavior due to cultural beliefs, trust in the health care providers, and linguistic barriers (Herbage and Devanport 8). The ability of an individual to pay as well as his location and management of health care services influences all these factors. Race and ethnicity are significant factors determining whether an individual stands to receive care, whether an individual receives quality care, and assesses health care outcomes. Even after adjusting insurance income and status, racial and ethnic minorities tend to have limited access to heath care and receive lower quality of health care compared to non-minorities. Not surprisingly, the Americans’ top two concerns of healthcare are its increased costs and lack of access. Cognitively, today the cost of health care insurance is high and increasingly unaffordable even to working families. Documented evidence reveals that 6.2 percent of all US bankruptcies in 2007 related to medical expenses (Halvorson 7-8). People with medical insurance covers filed 78 percent of these bankruptcies whereas low-income uninsured majorities filled 38.3 percent of the same bankruptcies. In 2008, uninsured Americans were 46.3, a report released by the US Census Bureau. This figure represents 16.2 percent of the US economy, depicts that health care is the largest industry in the US, and emp loys more than 14 million people. Additionally, this impeding problem stretch to show that racial and ethnic disparities in health care persists even when comparing groups of similar socioeconomic status (Barr 87). For example, the