The following
Public Hea
lth Care
is an excerp t from a personal na rrative of my opinions on various rand om topics. I call the proje Meandering ct Thoughts o n the Aware and it is inten ness of Bein ded to be a g, re c o rd of how my e as a father, h xperiences usband, son , b ro th er, friend and shaped the student human I am and continue to b ecome.
I find it utterly ridiculous that this topic can even be up for debate in our country. The World Health Organization’s World Health Report in 2000 ranked the United States health system at 37th in the world (The World Health Organization’s Ranking of the World Health
The World Health Report in 2000 ranked the United States health care system at 37th in the world.
Systems). 37! The countries of San Marino and Andorra are ranked three and four respectively. How many people can actually say that they’ve even heard of those countries, let alone find them on a map? Yet the performances of those countries’ health care systems rank far higher than the United States. Why? There are many factors. The World Health Organization has not produced these rankings since 2000 because of the shear complexity of the task, but it used five factors to help measure health care system performance: overall level of population health; health inequalities (or disparities) within the population; overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of patient satisfaction and how well the system acts); distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well people of varying economic status find that they are served by the health system); and the distribution of the health system’s financial burden within the population (who pays the costs) (World Health Organization Assesses the World Health Systems). There are nearly 46 million Americans currently without health care, with another 25 million underinsured (What You Need to Know About Health Care Reform). I have to wonder how, in the most powerful, wealthiest nation on earth, can this be possible? The World Health Organization’s report not only ranked the total performance of health care systems, but it ranked them within each of the five categories as well. While the United States did well in the responsiveness of its
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