PBS Film Review

The Health Care: America vs. the World PBS video gave a great overview of the current American system for health care and compared them to other nation across the globe. America system has many flaws such as the extremely high price for prescription drugs or medically necessary operations. Another major flaw that was discussed in the video was the lack of coverage of people and the fear of not being able to afford medical help when needed. People do not go see a doctor regularly due to out of pocket expenses when make for late diagnosis of diseases and cancer which make treatment more costly and less likely to be successful. Government funded health care through Medicaid is only provided to extremely low-income families or sometime not at all. This makes people working low-income jobs where there is no employer funded insurance or if there is, it is too expensive to afford with the person’s current income. There is some good from the American health system and the first one is that if you need an operation and can afford it with insurance or out of pocket then you can get the operation with little or no wait. The second good thing from the American health system is that due to the availability of large profits to be made it has caused great medical develops that have saved lives. When compared to other countries the American health system falls short in many different ways such as not covering a large population or people like minorities and low-income families. The UK, Canada and Australia have government funded insurance for all of its people which means everyone is covered and can get medical treatment when needed. The drawback as shown in the video is that in the UK a person needed knee surgery and due to it not being life threatening has had to wait over a year for the surgery in pain. This is also similar in Australia, but Australia allows people to get private insurance so that have coverage they want and get the treatments they need without waiting. They are also experiencing draw backs due to younger generations not electing to have private insurance and putting a large burden on the system. They are also under serving minority groups of the indigenous people which have significant worse health outcomes compared to European population. Switzerland has private insurance but forces all of the citizens to pay for private insurance. They get quality care when they need it with no waiting period for operations such as knee surgery. The problems in their system are that some citizens feel they are being forced to pay for something they don’t use and the insurance cost for the citizens is significantly higher to offset the cause for those that can not afford insurance. All four of these countries spend lots of time regulating medical costs that doctors and hospitals can charge for service. These countries also regulate cost of drugs as well which caused for Canada to have a slower roll out of the COVID 19 vaccine in the country. This was a big as problem because due to their health care system and polices they had three times less death per capita when compared to America. Noted by the specialist that they had in the video is that it would be hard for America to adopted any of the health care system due to many different factors, with politics being the largest roadblock. Hospital and Medical companies spend lots of money for politicians to get elected and adjust policies that are made to help keep their profit. Overall each health care system has issues and none of them are perfect but America can use other health care system to address issues and help cover most citizens so they do not have worry about how they are going to pay for medical treatments.