Assignment 4: The Influence of Health Policies and the Future of Health Care in the U.S.
December 15, 2014

In today’s society, our health care system is complex in the way it is setup and how it operates. There are many issues that we face in the health care systems today. Diseases, health disparities and health insurance are some of the major issues that are on the rise. Granted we are capable of preventing diseases through preventive medicine and advance technology, the morality rate of the United States will continue to decline. Macro trends like diseases, injuries, illnesses and population groups have become a concern as well. Regardless of your race, gender, income status or geographic location, hypertension, obesity and chronic diseases surround individuals daily. The major points that were presented by the narrator concerning issues and problems inherent in overall health care in the U.S. is the use of a incorrect “paradigm” for the world in which we live and “80-90% of our diseases are in result of the lifestyle we live, how we deal with stress and how we treat people (Miller, 2011)”. If we address these issues (stress, anxiety, relationships) 80-90% of our illnesses would disappear. Sadly, the Health Care System in the USA treats the symptoms of the imbalances.
The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented financial crisis. The projected federal budget deficit is at an all-time high and is almost certain to balloon further in the near term. Outstanding debt, currently in excess of $10 trillion, is staggering. The unfunded liabilities for existing entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, dwarf that number. “During 2008, we spent an estimated $2.4 trillion on healthcare in the United States,1 representing more than 16% of the gross domestic product (GDP); both the dollar and percentage of GDP levels have continued to grow over time (Harris, 2009)”. This creates a financial burden on individuals, a competitive burden on business, and a funding burden on all levels of government. Yet we have more than 40 million people in this country who do not have adequate healthcare coverage by U.S. standards, and comparative measures of the outcomes from our present healthcare system are not commensurate with our high level of spending. There seems to be general agreement that we cannot continue to meet the enormous societal obligations we face without identifying and systematically addressing the inefficiency and waste that help fuel the spiraling cost of healthcare. Rectifying these severe economic imbalances and healthcare-system shortcomings is likely to be a long, difficult, and painful process; and there are widely differing views on how to accomplish the needed corrections. An important aspect on which there does appear to be general agreement is the imperative for broad based reform to improve effective access to quality healthcare coverage, while simultaneously controlling runaway costs.
The belief that our healthcare system is in need of substantial reform has become widespread, although sometimes for differing reasons. Most of these reasons, however, can be categorized as involving access to affordable healthcare coverage, the quality and efficacy of the care provided, and the cost of our healthcare system. It is our belief that each of these aspects of healthcare is important by itself, but that meaningful reform must consider all of them together in a sound and cohesive way. The rising number of people in the United States without health insurance coverage, along with growing concern by others about losing their coverage to economic conditions, is reported regularly in the popular press. For many individuals of modest means, the price of healthcare coverage strains the limits of affordability. For most employers and other healthcare-plan sponsors, benefit costs represent both a financial and a competitive burden. Access to healthcare coverage obviously could be improved by finding