Washington — While the United States has led the world in discovering new techniques for treating a variety of illnesses, many of its citizens still receive inadequate health care. HMOs are under fire, as are insurance companies, medical centers and medical professionals. President Harry Truman first proposed national health insurance, and the Clinton administration made another stab at it and failed. Dubbed socialized medicine, opponents point to such systems in Great Britain and Canada as failures. So other methods are being tried, but all of them center around insurance. It is simply a matter of paying for protection.
Yet no one wants the insurance companies including federally run entities such as Medicare dictating care. Most people believe that treatment is a matter to be determined between doctor and patient. In truth, such decisions must include the entities paying the bills: the insurance companies. So what we have now is an evolving medical care system that is punctuated by trial and error. And the errors abound.
On Thursday, March 1, the Institute of Medicine released a report on the status of health care in the United States, which it found very poor. The Institute is a private organization chartered by the U.S. Congress to advise the federal government on scientific matters.
According to the report, many Americans spend too much time finding a physician who is willing to see them right away and who knows the correct therapy for their problems. The report said, "The frustration levels of both patients and clinicians have probably never been higher. Health care today harms too frequently and routinely fails to deliver its potential benefits."
The study found that it took an average of 17 years for major medical breakthroughs to become accepted and used by regular physicians. It also found that women must wait nine weeks to get a biopsy on a suspicious mammogram; patients could not access their own medical records, and, as a result, could not consider other treatment options; medical records on paper are easily lost when patients switch physicians; and many of those inflicted with chronic illnesses are often sent from specialist to specialist without anyone coordinating their treatments.
The report recommended that Congress set aside $1 billion over the next three to five years to overhaul the current system. It also recommended a shift toward a patient-oriented health care system, letting patients have greater access to their medical records, and a greater use of technology, including electronic medical records and electronic correspondence between doctors, nurses and patients. Furthermore, the report suggested that the federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality set national standards for the treatment of the 15 most common diseases in the United States.
Dr. Lucian Leape of Harvard University, one of the report's co-authors, said, "The medical establishment will have trouble with this. [But] patients fall through the cracks.... It doesn't have to be that way. There are ways to make it possible for patients to be taken care of promptly and efficiently and not break the bank." Leape also said he believed that the insurance industry's cost-cutting practices have hindered the medical community's attempts to shift its focus.
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