Americas Health Care

America is in the middle of a health care crisis. Many American citizens do not have health insurance and have no means of attaining it. Health insurance should be available and made affordable for all citizens of the United States. This is one of the richest countries in the world, yet we lack the basic necessities that people in other countries give to their citizens.

The amount of American citizens that do not have health insurance is staggering. There are over nine million children in the United States that are not insured. ( Kage, 2006) Parents either have jobs where insurance has been cut due to costs, or the insurance that is offered is too much for them to pay for. In order to ensure that our children can grow up healthy, we need to make sure that they have access to doctors.

America could possibly wipe out virtually all communicable diseases if either free or affordable health insurance were available to all citizens. If you look at years past when millions of people were dying of diseases such as measles, and whooping cough, and you look at present day society, where immunizations are available to all children in the United States, you can see that these diseases have virtually been wiped out. One of the big issues today is childhood obesity. If parents had access to insurance where they could take their children to the doctor for regular check ups, the obesity rate may not be as high. Doctors would see the trend in a child’s weight gain and be able to educate the parents as to how to get the child’s weight down. Also, if parents did not have to pay so much to take their children to the doctor, they might be able to afford healthier food, and we, as a nation would not have this obesity problem.

In addition to wiping out childhood diseases, providing insurance to American citizens could end up saving money for those that have insurance in the long run. Right now, those people with insurance are paying for those who do not have it, and the majority of people with insurance do not realize that they are paying it. Doctors raise their rates to cover the losses of those that have no insurance. Hospitals raise their rates as well to make up their loss for those who come to the emergency room to seek treatment that could have been provided by a regular physician, but could not afford to pay for the office visit. If a person can not afford to pay for an office visit, what are the chances that they can pay for the emergency room visit?

While many Americans will use the emergency room as a regular doctor, there are those who will wait until whatever is wrong with them gets so bad, they end up in the hospital for lengthy stays. Some of these people will even die. This could possibly be prevented if these people had insurance and could get to a primary care doctor. We have people who survive cancer because it was caught in time to treat it, but we have even more people who are dying from the same forms of cancer because they lacked the insurance to go to a doctor and have their ailments caught in time. It does not seem fair that a person will die because they could not afford treatment. There is no reason for this to happen in this country.

There are other countries that have some form of universal health care for their citizens. “Germany came in first for universal health insurance among 14 industrialized nations” (Welle, 2006). Canada is another country that has a universal health plan. If these countries can provide insurance to their citizens, there is no reason why America can not do the same. According to Holly Dressel, “America has been the control subject for other countries for over 30 years.” (2006). It seems that some of the countries that provide some form of insurance t their citizens