Disorganization In Healthcare

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With jobs scarce and gas prices rising to four dollars a gallon, something has got to give. Unemployment rates are lingering at nine percent, which is double the numbers of 2001 (data.bls.gov, 2011) and things aren’t getting better at all. The recession is in full bloom and the promises of politicians who claimed “change” have since been silenced by criticisms from American’s who are in need of something to fix the many problems that have been ongoing for years. Healthcare is no different as the costs of appointments, premiums, and medications continue to rise as the value of our dollar continues to fall along with the economy. How did everything get so bad? The disorganization and lack of a centralized authority to oversee our healthcare…show more content…
medicine was generally limited to two parties – patients and physicians” (Sultz & Young, 2011). Any treatment received by a pateint was considered “confidential” and never left the office of the physician (Sultz & Young, 2011). Health care in those days was simple, compared to current trends, “and usually involved long-standing relationships with patients and their families” (Sultz & Young, 2011). There was a “intimate physician-patient relationship that the profession held sacred” where “physicians set and usually adjusted their charges to their estimates of patients’ ability to pay and collected their own bills” (Sultz & Young, 2011). Just imagine knowing your doctor on a first name basis, not dealing with insurance company co-pays or deductibles, and being able to discus how much you could afford for health care instead of receiving a bill from a third party billing…show more content…
“The Baylor University Hospital plan… was the most influential of those insurance experiments” as it enrolled “1,250 public school teachers at 50 cents a month for a guaranteed 21 days of hospital care” (Sultz & Young, 2011). Baylor was credited with creating the model for the Blue Cross Hospital Insurance, which had expanded to 26 plans and more than 600,000 members by 1937 (Sultz & Young,
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