Health Care and You, Just the Facts

Hey people. This blog will be dedicated mainly to describing the current developments in health care reform on the local and national level. But before I start going into talking shop about health policy, I’m going to describe why you as a consumer of information would care to read this blog in the first place.

I’m hoping this first post will be a general overview of, WHY “Health Care Reform?” If your eyes glazed over after reading this, then you’re probably not completely involved with this issue at the moment. And that’s ok.

One of the reasons that health care is so big right now has to do with the direction of public policy. When new presidents come into power, they try to pass their key legislation within their first year of holding office. In President Obama’s case, he made many campaign promises regarding Health Care that he is trying to change while he still fresh as Commander-in-Chief.

President Obama realizes that there are some flaws with the American Health Care system. A report by the World Health Organization (WHO) quoted, “The U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance.” America it should be noted spends the most most money per capita ($5,267) than any other nation in the world.

2005 census information shows that 46.6 million people do not have health coverage .

With a country of 300 million people 15.3% are not covered by Health Insurance.

These uninsured people share many qualities including: showing an increased number of excessive deaths, receive less preventative care that lead to normally treatable diseases, and as cancer patients are 1.6% more likely to die after 5 years of diagnoses than insured patients.

Remember Obama’s goal is to, “Provide more security to those who have health insurance. It will provide insurance to those who don’t. And lower the cost of health care for our families, our business, and our government.”

Government is taking on the issue of Health Care Reform because it is their duty to protect their citizens. But the tricky situation of the issue is that Health Care coverage currently is a Private enterprise. And when government gets its hands in the private sector, people get a little worried and start throwing out charged words like “socialism” and “communism.”

Now that we have a general background of the what “health care” means, we can start looking at the current debate in a national context, and also I’ll bring you some insight of the debate from my parts of Amherst, Massachusetts. Talk to you soon.