MHA-614-Week-1-Discussion-2

MHA 614 Policy Formation & Leadership in Health Organizations           

Discussion 2: Comprehensive National Health Insurance

According to Steinmo and Watts (in Harrington & Estes), Comprehensive National Health Insurance always fails in America; Discuss the authors’ viewpoint. Do you agree with the authors? Why or why not?

ANSWER:

Steinmo and Watts offered an opinion and gave several reasons why passing a comprehensive national health insurance policy has failed in the past. There are several stakeholders such as lobbyists for and against, politicians who often work on behalf of lobbyists instead of their constituents and the uncertainty of implementing policy that has never been administered on a national level. While I agree that the hurdles to achieving such sweeping reform spread far and wide, I do not agree that these hurdles equate to national health insurance being a failure.

Many of the hurdles associated with national health insurance have already been overcome by President Barak Obama; therefore the only remaining risk is proper implementation by administrators. Furthermore, other countries that have similar economic structure and GDP have successfully implemented national health care policy with great success. Additionally, they have also initiated value-add technologies like electronic medical records that take many of the inefficiencies out of a system on a national scale.

References

Harrington, C., & Estes, C. L. (2008). Health Politics and Political Action. In Health policy: Crisis and reform in the U.S. health care delivery system (5th ed., pp. 1-13). Sudbury, Mass: Jones and Bartlett Pub