President Obama Considers healthcare as an important aspect required for ensuring the wellbeing of the population. Currently, the US has been affected with a crisis in the healthcare sector. People especially those in need have to pay a huge price for acquiring healthcare in the form of insurance premiums. Many are not able to afford the costly healthcare services. People who are chronically ill or have been handicapped, requiring special healthcare needs would not be able to survive at the rate healthcare costs have increased. Due to these high cost, people are made to suffer needlessly.
At the cost of the people, insurance companies and drug firms are doing well and making huge profits. Many people who cannot afford insurance premiums are being completely uninsured and are at the risk of being seriously affected with poor healthcare. There are more than 45 million uninsured in the US. In the last 6 years, there has been a 90 % rise in helath insurance premiums. Compared to the normal rate of inflation and the rise in wages, there has been a serious rise in healthcare costs (Kaiser Network, 2007). Companies are also finding it very difficult to provide health insurance coverage to their employees.
Many companies have laid-off several staff or have even shut down due to the high costs and compulsion of providing helath insurance to their employees. As more and more employers are not providing insurance coverage to their employees, there is a rise in the uninsured (Kaiser Network, 2007). Besides, there is a huge amount being spent unnecessarily on healthcare. The administrative costs, paperwork, distribution and sharing of information by a healthcare organization, etc, needlessly consumes huge financial resources without any improvement in the quality of services.
Besides, medical errors have been very costly to the US healthcare system. Unnecessary expenditure is spent on treating diseases, rather than laying emphasis on preventing them. Screening and testing has been discouraged, when in fact it could help lower the costs of healthcare (Kaiser Network, 2007). President Obama is aiming at covering the uninsured and lowers the costs of healthcare through several measures. When Obama was a senator in the state of Illinois, he passed a legislation to insure more than 20000 children and 65000 adults for healthcare.
He encouraged the use of preventive healthcare screening and checkups for preventing diseases such as cancer, and hence lower costs (Kaiser Network, 2007). Obama also plans the Universal healthcare that guarantees health coverage for every American brings down the cost of insurance premiums drastically and provides free health insurance (White, 2007). He also plans to remove any element that is present in the healthcare system that would increase the costs unnecessarily, result in huge wastages and cause serious amount of inefficiency.
Once the uninsured populations are covered, all aspects including emergency medical services, disease management, preventive healthcare, maternity and gynecology, mental health, etc, would be covered. People would be getting insurance in spite of changing jobs (Kaiser Network, 2007). The Federal government also will pay for serious illnesses such as heart diseases and cancer and in this way substantially reduce the amount spend by insurance companies. A greater amount would be spend on preventing diseases by measures such as annual checkups, screening, etc.
Obama plans to update technology utilized by the healthcare sector in order to improve quality and efficiency and lower down the costs. EMR would effectively provide nurses and doctors as one of the means of obtaining patient information and improving the quality of care (and reduce errors). Unnecessary paperwork and stay in the hospital would be reduced. Obama also plans to utilize greater number of generic drugs so as to reduce the profits that the drug companies would unnecessarily earn at the cost of the people (Kaiser Network, 2007).
People consider that President Obama would be going in for multiple payers in the universal healthcare system. One of the payers in such a system would include the government (White, 2007). I do support President Obama over his healthcare plan as it would ensure better and broader coverage for the people, and in this way reduce the amount spend previously on the uninsured population. With time, having the universal healthcare system would be more profitable than the current insurance system.
Also the universal healthcare system would aim to improve the quality of care. Drug companies would require providing generic versions of the drugs rather than branded versions. This would ensure lowering of costs but at the same time help to meet the unmet needs of the population (Kaiser Network, 2007). Employers are currently spending huge amount on health insurance premiums for their employees. Providing universal healthcare would ensure that the employee can increase wages and prevent unnecessarily laying off or closure.
The quality of healthcare would also improve as the professionals would be looking for incentives provided for improved quality of services rather than the number of patients they would be treating or number of procedures that would be performing (Knowledge Emory, 2008). References Kaiser Network (2007). Sen. Barack Obama Discusses Health Care Reform Plan Iowa City, Iowa May 29, 2007, Retrieved on January 5, 2008, from Kaiser Network Web site: http://www. kaisernetwork. org/health_cast/uploaded_files/052907_h08_obama_transcript.
pdf Knowledge Emory (2008). Why the Complex U. S. Healthcare System Will Challenge America’s Next President, Retrieved on January 5, 2008, from Knowledge Emory Web site: http://knowledge. emory. edu/article. cfm? articleid=1154 White, D. (2007). Obama on Universal Health Care – Will He Anger Liberals? , Retrieved on January 5, 2008, from About US Liberal Politics Web site: http://usliberals. about. com/b/2007/01/29/obama-on-universal-health-care-will-he-anger-liberals. htm