A GRIM DIAGNOSIS
The current state of healthcare in the United States
By
SCOTT WU ABHIJIT RAMAPRASAD (Editor)
The United States health care system is at a tipping point – it’s that simple. What is not so simple are the problems threatening to push our system – and both patients and providers along with it – over the edge. Despite numerous groundbreaking innovations in medical technology and research in recent years, health care in America has evolved into a fragmented industry plagued by intimidating problems of access and quality. Millions of Americans – rural and urban, minorities and non-minorities, and Democrats and Republicans, etc. – still lack health insurance. Even for those fortunate enough to get care through either the private insurance system (paid for by their employer or the individual they are legally dependent upon) or the newly founded public health care
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system funded by taxes (yes, this is Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act), the quality of care remains insufficient. None of the issues facing the American health care system are any one person’s fault; they are, however, everyone’s problem.
Since FDR
In the history of the United States, there have been myriad attempts to create national health care coverage, whether through whispers in the Oval Office or through national campaigns. For over one hundred years, presidential administrations have struggled to balance the demands of public interest and private influence; a system that included health care, which is available to all but not necessarily run by the government, was thus produced out of such struggle. Meeting the needs of both the general public – not just working adults but also the young, old, and unemployed – and conflicting private interests has not been successful. Medicare and Medicaid, which, generally support the elderly and impoverished, respectively, are hailed as some of the only successful government-sponsored health care programs to ever be enacted with bipartisan support. However, they still only meet the needs of a small subset of the population. While the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – also mentioned under the names Affordable Care Act and Obamacare – passed in 2010
