Saturday, October 17, 2009

Health Care

At their core, Americans all want the same basic things: a quality education for their children, a good job so they can provide for their families, healthcare and affordable prescription drugs, security during retirement, a strongly equipped military and national security. -Ruben Hinojosa

Everyone knows about President Obama’s push for universal health care in the United States. He has given several of speeches about the need for a reform in our health care system and he intends to get one. Personally, I have always feared this idea because of problems that have been heard from other countries taking on health care. When it comes to get everyone in a country adequate health care it seems to me like an impossible task. There are so many problems that come with reforming the health care system. The first major problem is financial. How is our government supposed to pay for everyone to get the proper help they need from doctors. Our national debt is all ready through the roof and adding the burden of providing health care would just add to the debt even more. Right now, people receive health care through their employers. I understand that this is not the best, especially with so many people unemployed, but it is what the country can truly handle at this moment. Are priority should be somehow figuring out how to pay for such an extreme project and get some funding before trying to pass bills in congress that would get to this new health care system. Another issue is if this new health care system is what we really want or need as a people. Think about it for a moment, if you knew the government was providing free health care for you, you would likely go to the doctor for every little sickness because you don’t have to care about paying for it. With everyone having this same mindset the hospitals, doctors would become overwhelmed by patients, become understaffed, under resourced and the overall ability of our health care system would halt. I recently became very ill and my mom decided to take me to a walk-in clinic. We had tried to get an appointment with our family doctor but there were no opening. My family had gotten really concerned because I had been getting increasingly sick. By the time we headed out for the clinic my fever had reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit which is fairly dangerous. My mom called in to the walk-in clinic hoping that I would be seen as soon as I got there, because of my increasing fever. When we got there the waiting area was very crowded and we sat down and waited for my name to be called. I was still very sick because of the fever and decided to lie down along a couple of the chairs and try and get comfortable. Even after calling in early and being probably the sickest person in the waiting room, I had to wait forty-five minutes to be seen by a doctor. Afterwards I was thinking to myself, if we have a health care reform like President Obama wants, who knows how much longer it would have taken them to see me. By the time they did see me my temperature had increased to 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit. We as a nation are in the middle of a health scare with H1N1 virus all over the place and so more people are going in and getting checked for Swine Flu already putting the hospitals and medical centers on the edge. If everyone in the nation had health care and felt the need to get checked out for the flu or a virus that is spreading all over, our medical centers probably would be unable to function properly and there would be even longer waits to be checked or be seen by a doctor even if you were extremely sick like I was this past week. If we do end up having a health care reform the first thing we need to do is make sure that we have not only the financial resources but the medical resources prepared well enough for an increase in patients because that is inevitably what will happen. I would rather stick with the health care system we have, as messed up as it may be, and be able to be seen by a doctor in a decent amount of time when I am truly ill than have to wait around slowly dying to be seen by a doctor who is exhausted and expended on an overflow of patients that he can barely do his job.

No comments:

Post a Comment