Introduction of the Policy Over the past decades, healthcare has been one of the major financial drains, siphoning off over 600 billion yearly of Americans’ daily expenses. The issue of healthcare and its ever-increasing cost has become a lightening rod in American sociopolitical morass whereby the successive White House administrations since President Theodore Roosevelt, have tried to introduce national health insurance for all Americans but to no avail (Walker, Thompson, & Bergman, 1993). In fact, the federal governments’ failures in the past to establish comprehensive national health insurance for all have not prevented the policy makers in Washington from trying to come up with an acceptable health plan. Currently, one of the highly
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Every nation needs a healthy workforce or citizens, and the best way to maintain healthy workforce is to have affordable and unhindered access to healthcare delivery system. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the United States. The debate about the proper course of action has been so polarized and politicized that there has never been a consensus regarding whether all Americans should have free national health insurance or to stick to the status quo—privately individualized healthcare controlled by the for-profit insurance industries. It is well documented that among all the industrialized nations the United States is the only one that does not have guaranteed national health insurance for all its citizens. Many studies have shown that the nation’s healthcare expenditure covers about 17% of the GDP, yet nearly 46 million citizens in the country lack medical insurance (Couch & Joyce, 2011). The actual problem here is not that the United States lacks the necessary resources and logistical support to implement national health insurance for all its citizens, but the fact that many of the country’s decision makers appear to be caught up in the lobbying chess games of the multi-billion health insurance industry. The result is that our policy makers have almost lost the political will and have become impotent in terms of devising any
Every nation needs a healthy workforce or citizens, and the best way to maintain healthy workforce is to have affordable and unhindered access to healthcare delivery system. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the United States. The debate about the proper course of action has been so polarized and politicized that there has never been a consensus regarding whether all Americans should have free national health insurance or to stick to the status quo—privately individualized healthcare controlled by the for-profit insurance industries. It is well documented that among all the industrialized nations the United States is the only one that does not have guaranteed national health insurance for all its citizens. Many studies have shown that the nation’s healthcare expenditure covers about 17% of the GDP, yet nearly 46 million citizens in the country lack medical insurance (Couch & Joyce, 2011). The actual problem here is not that the United States lacks the necessary resources and logistical support to implement national health insurance for all its citizens, but the fact that many of the country’s decision makers appear to be caught up in the lobbying chess games of the multi-billion health insurance industry. The result is that our policy makers have almost lost the political will and have become impotent in terms of devising any