10 Lies Health Cares Tell

Access to advanced health care services is something we are able to all agree would be a good thing for this country. Experiencing a significant illness is among life's major challenges also to face it without the means to pay for it is positively frightening. But as we shall see, once we know the facts, we shall find that achieving this goal will not be easy without our individual contribution.

These are the themes I'll touch on to try to make some sense out of what is happening to American health care and the steps we can personally take to make things better.

A recent history of American health care - what has driven the costs so high?
Important elements of the Obama health care plan
The Republican view of healthcare - free market competition
Universal access to state of the art health care - a worthy goal but not easy to achieve
what can we do?
First, let's get yourself a little historical perspective on American health care. This is not intended to be an exhausted consider that history but it will give us an appreciation of how the health care system and our expectations for this developed. What drove costs higher and higher?

To begin, let's turn to the American civil war. In that war, dated tactics and the carnage inflicted by modern weapons of the era combined to cause ghastly results.healthy lifestyle tips Not generally known is that the majority of the deaths on both sides of this war were not the result of actual combat but to what happened following a battlefield wound was inflicted. In the first place, evacuation of the wounded moved at a snail's pace and this caused severe delays in treating the wounded. Secondly, many wounds were subjected to wound care, related surgeries and/or amputations of the affected limbs and this often led to the onset of massive infection. So you may survive a battle wound and then die as a result of medical care providers who although well-intentioned, their interventions were often quite lethal. High death tolls can be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases in a period when no antibiotics existed. In total something like 600,000 deaths occurred from all causes, over 2% of the U.S. population at the time!

Let's skip to the initial half of the 20th century for a few additional perspective and to bring us up to newer times. Following the civil war there have been steady improvements in American medicine in both understanding and treatment of certain diseases, new surgical techniques and in physician education and training. But also for the most part the very best that doctors can offer their patients was a "wait and see" approach. Medicine could handle bone fractures and increasingly attempt risky surgeries (now largely performed in sterile surgical environments) but medicines were not yet open to handle serious illnesses. The majority of deaths remained the consequence of untreatable conditions such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever and measles and/or related complications. Doctors were increasingly alert to heart and vascular conditions, and cancer however they had almost nothing with which to take care of these conditions.