A health care system in any country has certain basic goals that it aims to achieve. The three basic goals of any health care system are; to protect families from getting into financial ruin as a result of medical bills, to ensure that people or citizens remain healthy, and to provide proper health care services to prevent or treat diseases. Different countries have varying health care systems. A health care system refers to an arrangement through which health care is delivered to the people.
According to the World Health Report 2000 (WHO, 2000), a health care system should be able to promote good health of the people, ensure there is fair financial contribution during the delivery of health care service, and it should be able to respond to the expectations of the people. The quality and efficiency of any health care system is very vital since it determines how well a system succeeds in providing appropriate health care to the people. Different countries have different health care models.
Despite the differences in the health care models, all systems aim at providing high quality health care services to the people (Stephen, 1996). Some countries have been considered to have better health care systems than others. For instance, the US health care system has for many years been considered to be one of the best in the world. However, the US health care system has shown its shortcomings also.
The system is viewed as failing to work for every one. For instance, by 2001, about 42.6 million Americans lacked health care insurance. Health care systems experience major problems such as peoples’ lack of access to health care services and the rising costs of health care services. This has resulted to a crisis in the systems, hence making it necessary for governments to search for solutions to the problems in order to improve the quality of health care services that are delivered to the people. However, developing strategies that will solve the problems has been difficult and not clear- cut.
Policy makers in the health sector have been accused of trying to address the symptoms of the crisis through patch work and short term solutions and they therefore fail to analyze the health care system itself. The need to identify problems that are experienced by different countries’ health care models and to find solutions to these problems makes the comparison of the different models important. There is need for the health care system models to be analyzed and researched on because the research findings can be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the models.
This knowledge can be applied to guide policy makers in the health sector as they develop policies that are effective in providing appropriate health care services to the people (Rowes, 2000). Being interested in this topic emanates from the desire to learn about different health care models that exist. By comparing the American health care model with universal models from developed countries, the paper will shed light on what aspects of the models need to be adopted and supported to address problems that have resulted to the health care crisis in America.
Furthermore, the study of health care models provides information and concepts that allow the evaluation of health care systems that exist. Background An analysis of health care models aims at answering the question of whether a health care system is good and fair in relation to financing the health costs. By comparing the American health care system model with other models from developed countries, how well the health system works can be analyzed. Various studies have been conducted to compare different health care models.
The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000 provided a ground breaking report with data on health care systems of about 191 member countries. This report highlighted three primary goals of any health care system. A good health care system must be fair in financing, provide good health, and respond to the expectations of the people. The study by WHO also was able to distinguish between the “fairness” and the overall “goodness” of health care systems. The study defined the “goodness” of a health care system as the best “attainable average level”, while “fairness” is the “smallest feasible differences among groups and individuals”.