Summary: The Necessity For Health Care Reform

The Necessity for Health Care Reform Last year my grandma had been having heart problems and her insurance company was saying that they weren’t going to cover much of the cost. She had been having problems with the medications the doctors were giving her and she really needed surgery. We brought her to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, because she needed special care. She ended up getting a pacemaker put in, and everything turned out to be going good. The insurance company covered some of the bill, but still left us with an enormous bill. We are mainly happy that she was alive, but the bill is getting overwhelming. Many people are faced with problems that come up in our health care system. The health care system is flawed, but no one
The government is already so far in debt, it is not a good idea to keep going deeper and deeper. Jonathan Oberlander states that our health care system must compete for funds with many other government worries like preventing the banking and financial systems from failing, making sure the recession doesn’t worsen, tax-cut plans, and the economic stimulus plans (para. 7). To be able to afford health care reform, the government needs to find ways of slowing the growing expenses. John Iglehart, was published in The New England Journal of Medicine, he states that “The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association estimates that some $60 billion (about 3% of total annual health care spending) is lost to fraud every year;” along with improper government payments losing $72 billion dollars for the U.S. Treasury in 2008 (para. 2). To me, this is a huge loss of money and we can’t be willing to lose this. Jeffrey Flier says there have been attempts on regulating and paying for the distribution of health care, but none have flourished. The current tax advantaged, employer based health insurance system is inefficient; and hides the true cost of insurance and care, causing many people to lose their jobs after getting sick (para. 5). The government can’t lay out a bunch of money when there have been no successful ways of making the health care system more organized. Eric Neilson says
Jonathan Oberlander states that our government has a list full of other priorities such as the economy (the federal deficit topping 1 trillion in 2009), Iraq, Afghanistan, taxes, energy policy and if health care reform failed it could “sap its political capital” (para. 2). We have to worry about getting our soldiers back safely as well as trying to getting our economy back on track. These are very big tasks to accomplish, and adding health care reform onto it would be overwhelming. Victor Fuchs says that politics play a big role in whether you can get something accomplished, and with all of the possible “choke points” that can stop change like passing through legislation (para. 4). In order for anything to be successful it has to go through the many systems of the political system. This takes a lot of time and work that the government can’t afford to lose. There is good reason to think that supporters of health care reform will fail, due to the fact that people who have a lot invested in the health care system will do whatever they can to fight major elements of reform (Oberlander, para. 5). The government has too much to deal with right now, without trying to fight with stakeholders in the health care