Quality of US Healthcare Essays - Healthcare Quality, Primary Care

In a country where the health care system is largely provided by the private sector, only 15% of the population has health insurance coverage. A situation that pushes us from the middle/lower social class to wonder about the quality of care we are receiving. The healthcare system is as much controversial as getting the care we need, and how this one is delivered to us. The President of the United States had signed a comprehensive health reform on March 23rd, 2010, the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which is expected to bring changes to the system, and this act is supposedly bringing a new momentum to the healthcare industry. The American population is actually wondering whether a deep analysis of the future trends on healthcare should give them a clear understanding of where the United States healthcare would be in the next years to come, including improvement on the safety and reliability of the healthcare system. If we were to describe the U.S. healthcare system with all its components, we would have to say that it is a facet of complex interactions of people, institutions, and technology. For many Americans healthcare may be described as the interaction between a primary care physician and patient to address minor and urgent medical problems such as colds, flu, or back pain. A primary care physician (PCP); usually a general practitioner, a family practitioner, internist, or pediatrician, is the ?forefront? caregiver or even the first health qualified personnel to estimate and treat the patient. In a physician office there are lots of routines physical examinations, anticipation such as immunization and health rerun to detect disease, and treatment of acute and chronic diseases. The healthcare system consists of all the medical personnel tied together in one field. This system may be viewed as a complex made up of three interrelated components: people in need of healthcare services called hea lthcare consumers; those who deliver the service, the professionals and practitioners called healthcare providers; and systematic arrangements for delivering healthcarethe public and private agencies that organize, plan, regulate finance, and coordinate servicescalled the institutions or organizations of the healthcare system. This institutional component includes hospitals, clinics, and home-health agencies; the insurance companies and programs that pay for services like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, managed-care plans such as health maintenance organizations, and preferred providers organizations; an entitlement program like Medicaid. Also included are agencies and associations that research and monitor the quality of health care services; license and accreditation providers and institutions; local, state, and national professional societies; and the companies that produce medical technology, equipment, and pharmaceuticals (a href="http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/1817/Nation-s-Health- Care-System-COMPONENTS-HEALTH-CARE-SYSTEM.html">The Nation's Health Care System - The Components Of The Health Care System/a>) Despite the higher cost of our healthcare system, one would think that the service we are providing would be astonishing; we would actually see the improvement of making the hospitalized patients more comfortable in their skin. While the economy is getting tougher, the high cost of living is climbing up the trees; our healthcare system still falls behind other nations in term of quality, access, affordability. Five affluent international trading partners of the United States spend far less on health care, yet the comparative value of these countries' health systems- measured by cost, workforce health, and quality of care- is often better than that experienced by American workers and employers. And that "value gap" puts the United States at a distinct competitive disadvantage to their global peers, according to the Business Roundtable's Health System Value Comparability Study (Anonymous, 2011). Comparing the value of U.S. health care with that of the health systems of the "G-5" countr ies (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), the study finds that our nation has made progress in improving healthcare value over previous years but still trailed the G-5 by 2,0.8 percentage points in 2007. "At the current rate of gap closure, it would take over 20 years for the U.S. health system to pull even with the value delivered by the health systems of the G-5 and an additional 10 years to establish a meaningful lead," the authors say. When comparing our healthcare system to other nations? healthcare organism, we would say the health insurance of certain countries are costs less than