to health and back Essay -- essays research papers

To Health and Back To understand health care and its complexities, let’s first take a look at how it is defined in the dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary defines health care as the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of mental and physical well-being through the services offered by the medical and allied health professions. Now that we have a definition of health care let us further explore and understand the concepts of traditional and alternative health care. To begin with, all American health care is provided to patients by a diverse array of entities. There are nonprofit hospitals, which may be operated by county governments, state governments, religious orders, or independent nonprofit organizations. There are for-profit hospitals, which are usually operated by large private corporations. There are many outpatient clinics, which may be operated by any of the above organizations or may be a partnership of health care professionals (essentially a large medical or dental group). Finally, there are some health care professionals who individually, or in a group, practice for personal profit. Costs of medical supplies (consumables), machines, tools, and pharmaceuticals are usually passed through to the patient or their insurer. The default legal situation has always been that the patient must pay out-of-pocket in full for all services rendered, as with any other service industry; this business model is known as â€Å"fee-for-service.† But today, fee-for-service is only for the minority of people who are not covered by any kind of insurance. Most people are covered by some kind of cost-spreading insurance which distributes the risk of illness and the cost of health care among a group of people. This means that each individual or their employer pays predictable monthly premiums, so that when any given individual needs health care, they will have to pay up-front one of the following: (1) nothing (increasingly rare), (2) a minimum part of the total cost (a deductible), or (3) a small part of the cost of every single procedure (a co-payment). The entity that provides the health care is usually not the same entity that does the task of spreading the cost of it. The exceptions are health maintenance organiz ations like Kaiser Permanente which run their own hospital and clinic networks to control costs, and a few employers whic... ...itals clean them up and nurse them back to health, then discharge them to the street at the first legally justifiable opportunity; and then the same patients are back in the ER in three to six months after becoming critically ill again. The hospital often ends up absorbing the full cost of care, since many homeless people are convicted drug addicts, which makes them ineligible for almost all federal and state assistance programs for the poor. In the end, hospitals spread the cost to the patients who can pay (by raising prices on everything), which only further increases the total cost of health care for everyone. This increase in total cost may also cause additional people to become uninsured as insurance companies pass on the cost. Finally, the unavailability of preventive care and the high cost of paying out-of-pocket means that many working-class persons delay visiting an emergency room as long as possible. In turn, such persons are more vulnerable to catastrophic diseases that could have been much more easily treated if identified early through regular checkups (like cancer and heart disease). The financial cost of treating those diseases at a late stage is also much higher.