My commentary and ideas for children’s healthcare reform
When it comes to the nation’s healthcare system trying to provide for the poor children of this nation, there has to be some degree of socialization to standardize the care of the children. The country by nature is capitalistic which causes a disparity between social classes based on the level of income which is growing larger with time. Like any other part of our society, each social class has its own ideas of what is affordable and treat others like they can which poses a dilemma for the people who cannot live up to a higher social classes ideas of affordability on anything.
Health care especially for our nation’s children should not be subject to the social distortions of what is considered affordable and therefore has to be standardized in the care itself. What we as a society have done is put a price on a person’s overall health based on what type of medical serviced that can be rendered given the money that they can pay out for it whether it be out of pocket or through an insurance company. Even with going through an insurance company which provided health insurance the insurance company still dictates what services can be rendered based on the health insurance plan you can afford.
We need to do a few different things to bring all health care for children up to a minimum standard regardless of whether or not the child’s family can afford the care and have a safety net of some sort for those who cannot afford the medical costs.
Here is what I think should be done:
Create a minimum standard that must be adhered to by all medical personnel regardless of whether or not the patients family can afford the medical treatment or not, letting the doctors have a direct say in the minimum standards.
Research what those standards would cost families and the government for when the families cannot afford the costs, then set up the needed measures to pay for the medical costs rather than blindly funding anything that can be misconstrued into something that it is not.
Find ways of getting people to utilize preventative care when ever possible to ease the costs and waits of emergency room visits, which eat up a lot of both government and private insurance money. Do this even if it means setting up and/or expanding clinics in neighborhoods where the people can go to if it isn’t an emergency situation, where they can have a primary care doctor and possibly a triage unit to determine whether or not they should be seen in an emergency room or by their doctor there.
Rather than looking at a person’s or families income as the only deciding factor in affordability for health insurance especially for children we need to look at each region of the country and factor in the cost of living in that specific region to gain a better understanding of what is affordable rather than a blanket set of rules for the country as a whole since each region has its own unique pay scales and costs of living.
When determining what is affordable with minimum standards of medical care we have to would need to look at the price of the healthcare itself, the pay scale of the region and the cost of living for that region to see what is affordable in that area and set the requirements for government assistance accordingly.
A family in Louisiana has a far different cost of living than that of a family in New York, and just because the family In New York does make more doesn’t mean that they will be able to afford more than the one in Louisiana this is due to the fact that the costs of living are different in each region. If you look at the medical costs in each individual region the costs are reflective of the cost of living for that individual region which in turn will scale up the pay to meet the costs and therefore medical costs should not be subject to the social distortions based on income that are common through out our country.
