THE ORIGINAL question Please comment on one (1) of the following health care systems: Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada or Japan. Do you think the health care financing/delivery system you chose to discuss could be adopted in the US?
Why or why not? PLEASE RESPOND TO THIS DISCUSSION POST
.. With guaranteed physician and hospital services for all citizens, and the ability to pay for private insurance as of 2005, Canada healthcare has been thought to be a model for the U.S. to follow.
With a single payer, almost entirely public funded healthcare
model in Canada versus a multi payer, public and private funded model in the U.S., Canada can provide healthcare for less (Ridic et al., 2012). While this seems like the ideal model for other nations to follow, there has been several concerns such as long wait times for elective procedures or specialty care visits, overcrowded emergency departments, and an insufficient amount of primary care providers for the demands.
Despite this, evidence suggests that health equity, universality, accessibility, and quality of care all suffer with private healthcare financing (Lee et al., 2021). I specifically remember treating a patient on the unit I work who came over from Canada to receive an elective brain surgery. The patient was diagnosed with a large intracranial aneurysm, which needed to be treated within months to mitigate the large risk of rupture and subsequent hemorrhagic stroke. The patient was unable to schedule surgery for at least a year in Canada and therefore consulted the neurosurgical team in the U.S. who were able to schedule him within a matter of weeks. The patient scheduled the surgery knowing they would have to pay out pocket. Unfortunately, the patient had post op complications and ended up staying admitted in the ICU for several weeks and his healthcare bill skyrocketed. While this situation was obviously unfortunate, I think about if this patient couldnt afford the out-of-pocket costs for the surgery, let alone all the complications, he would need to wait just like everyone else and potentially have a morbid event occur due to the wait. Prior to caring for this patient, I always thought a healthcare model such as Canada’s may be the best option, but now I see it may cause inadequacies in health equity. In a study which assessed healthcare access between the U.S. and Canada, it was suggested that Canadians in high poverty neighborhoods had a 36% greater chance of receiving treatments and surviving acute and chronic health conditions (Escobar et al, 2019). As stated by Lee et al., (2020), In a free healthcare market, wealthier people would have the ability to access more and expedited healthcare, whereas poor people would make do with less and wait longer.
References Escobar, K. M., Murariu, D., Munro, S., & Gorey, K. M. (2019). Care of acute conditions and chronic diseases in Canada and the United States: Rapid systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Public Health Research, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.4081/jphr.2019.1479 Lee, S., Rowe, B., & Mahl, S. (2021). Increased private healthcare for canada: Is that the right solution? Healthcare Policy | Politiques De Sant, 16(3), 3042. https://doi.org/10.12927/hcpol.2021.26435 Ridic, G., Gleason, S., & Ridic, O. (2012). Comparisons of health care systems in the United States, Germany and Canada. Materia Socio Medica, 24(2), 112. https://doi.org/10.5455/msm.2012.24.112-120
