Obama’s Health Care Plan – Will It Work?

                                                                                         

Obama has promised affordable, high quality health care for all Americans. Part of his plan involves standardizing medical records, making them electronic, and ensuring they’re accessible to medical professionals nationwide.

How is that going to reduce health care costs? Although the idea behind this plan is stated as making health care more ‘efficient’, the truth is that what it will largely do is prevent medical error. All told - everything from surgical errors to medication mistakes – medical errors cost the U.S. tens of billions of dollars every year and cause hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

There have been several studies done on the cost of medical errors. A 1999 study reported an estimate of up to 100,000 deaths at a cost of nearly $38 billion.

A 2008 study found that nearly $9 billion dollars and about 238,000 preventable deaths involved Medicare patients alone.

Also in 2008, researchers analyzing the cost of medical errors concluded that preventing them could reduce health care costs by as much as 30%.

In 1998, the World Health Organization estimated that U.S. health care costs amount to over $4,000 per year per person. With a population of over 300 million, 30% represents a savings of a few hundred trillion dollars. More than enough to make sure we all have affordable health care.

What else will his plan do? An accessible database with medical information could help curb the prescription drug addiction and abuse epidemic and the number of deaths from prescription drug overdoses.

As prescription drug addiction often involves criminal activity, getting those statistics down will also save many more billions in things like the costs of incarceration, law enforcement, the justice system, related health care costs, and insurance rates for property and motor vehicles.

We’re talking about a lot of money.

Critics are worried about privacy. In fact, the only real reason privacy of medical records is such an issue is because the information is accessed illegally and unethically by people who have no right to know our personal information - employers, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers trying to figure out how to get us to take more drugs, for example.

Nevertheless, it’s true, as the critics state, that Obama cannot guarantee our privacy. But even now, without Obama’s planned database, any computer can be hacked, and anyone who really wants our medical information can, and does, get it.

It is, and will continue to be, the responsibility of employers to oversee the security of their databases and the responsibility of the government to formulate and enforce legislation so offenders will be caught and prosecuted.

Will putting the database in place somehow pose an even greater privacy risk? Perhaps. But nothing is perfect. And to the 50 million Americans who don’t have health care at all because they can’t afford it, to the 2 million people who go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, to families of the millions who’ve died from medical errors, and to those who’ve lost a loved one to deadly drug combinations that resulted in prescription drug overdoses, potential loss of medical privacy might seem a small price to pay.

About the author:
Gloria MacTaggart is a freelance writer that contributes articles on health.

info@drugrehabreferral.com

http://www.drugrehabreferral.com


Article Source: http://www.Free-Articles-Zone.com