Inefficiency of the U.S. Health Care System

The U.S. health care system is trapped in its inefficiency, preventing it from moving forward and insuring a greater percentage of the U.S population. It would be a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare to completely overhaul the U.S. health care system and build it from the ground up as Taiwan was able to do, as we heard on ‘Sick around the World’. Largely contributing to the U.S. system’s inefficiency is the free market in which it functions. U.S. health care is a for-profit business—unlike Great Britain’s system, which is funded by tax revenue and entirely government-owned and –operated. Functioning according to the laws of supply and demand, the U.S. system is in many ways dictated by economics. Further contributing to the number of uninsured is the for-profit nature of U.S. private health insurance, which also has say over who it will and will not cover.

Progress in the U.S. health care system is inhibited by bureaucracy. The HMO system with its gatekeepers is all about bureaucracy. And again, the predominantly privatized nature of the U.S. system is a jumbled mess when compared to the more streamlined system one finds with more government control, as in Great Britain and Taiwan, and even in the more privatized Japan and Germany.

There is a give-and-take in the U.S. system, as Sick around the World continually points out: the U.S. largely offers care of high quality (granted, to those who can afford it); clinical providers are, arguably, adequately compensated for their work. The U.S. health care system definitely has plenty of room for improvement, but I also did not want to neglect some of its positive aspects.