The study’s prime importance is the determination of the feasibility of having a universal health care program funded and managed by the government for the benefit of those who are unable to afford health care insurance. If and only if, the proposal, after weighing its pros and cons, is proven feasible enough and advantageous, it will greatly help the current situation of the health care industry. Review of the Literature Universal health care is a system of health care services provided to all citizens, and sometimes permanent residents, of a region or nation.
Most developing countries provide insurance programs to their citizens (Wikipedia, 2008). However, the United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee access to health care as a right of citizenship. In 1999, twenty-eight (28) industrialized nations have single-payer universal health care systems. On the other hand, Germany, which has the oldest universal health care system in the world, has a multi-payer universal health care system. The universal health care system programs vary widely in their structure and the organization funding them.
Government involvement, in the forms of embodying constitution, commission and regulation, is being required by universal health care systems, and in some cases, includes directly managing the health care system (Uninsured in America, 2000). A number of people argue that society should provide free health coverage to all of its members, while others argue that individuals should be financially responsible for their own health care and well being. Generally, it is the responsibility of the society to provide free health coverage to all of its members, an argument which can be supported with reasons.
It can be noted that Americans have been unable to reach a consensus on whether or not the society should provide free health coverage (Reinhardt, 1999, pp. 124. ). Partly, the reason for this is that there exist a continuously changing ways in which healthcare services are accessed and/or provided. Americans cannot agree on the basic values that should drive health care system. There is a need to establish whether or not healthcare is a basic human right or a privilege.
According to Himmelstein (2005), healthcare in the United States of America is provided by many separate legal entities. Recent estimations put the United States health spending at approximately 15% of the Gross Domestic Products. The United States government does not guarantee publicly-funded healthcare to its citizens. Citizens are required to acquire health insurance. If a citizen lacks such a policy, then he must either pay for treatment, or typically be treated at another, cheaper, or sometimes third-rate hospital, and in other cases, at the county hospital.
Various government programs for state aid exist to cover some emergency or more long-term care, and the generally high cost of treatment has led to the concept of doctors completing pro bono work in addition to their more high-paying customers, although in practice even serious conditions are left untreated (Himmelstein, 2005). The overall United States healthcare performance is ranked 37th by the World Health Organization (WHO), far below the average of the developed nations.
Health level in the United States is ranked seventy-second (72nd) in the world by World Health Organization, worse than China and comparable to Iraq. For example, the survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among developed nations, at nearly five (5) per one thousand (1,000) babies (Traynor, 2005). Methodology and Procedures This is a research paper which will examine the current universal healthcare system, its status and the problems besetting the system.
The paper will then proposing a government-funded universal health care privilege as an alternative to private insurance programs. A system with different universal health care philosophies and virtues will be introduced and analyzed. The limitation of the study are the scarcity of resources available, difficulty in finding the literature, search procedures, search engines and library, in order to efficiently analyze the current universal healthcare system status and propose a system that is applicable to a wide majority of people.