The Healthcare Crisis

Poverty Fuels Medical Crisis and Dismantling Toxic Racism both address what is quickly developing into our nation’s biggest problem, healthcare. As both of these articles pointed out there are many factors that contribute to a person’s overall health and even more factors that contribute to whether or not a person has healthcare. Poverty and race are the two main factors that the articles addressed concerning healthcare. These two elements are also linked together in the issue of healthcare. The bottom line is that without health insurance, no one can afford healthcare. However, health insurance premiums are so high that unless one has a good income one can’t afford to pay the premiums. This leads to all sorts of issues like lack of preventative measures so that the diseases and issues that the doctors do see are always very severe. It is a travesty that in such a rich country we have over 47 million uninsured.
While, these articles do a powerful job illustrating the injustices that the poor and marginalized groups of society are dealing with another interesting take on the healthcare crisis is Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko. This film chooses to focus on the problems of people with healthcare insurance. This is an interesting, but extremely effective tactic because the vast majority of people covered by healthcare insurance are becoming extremely dissatisfied with their coverage. Also, a recent trend is that employers, especially smaller employers, are unable to afford to offer employees healthcare coverage. Since, the middle classes are now being affected by the healthcare insurance coverage I feel like these issues will now come to a head. Yes, the healthcare injustices that the poor and minority groups are dealing with are horrific and should stir this nation into action, but realistically I feel that since the middle classes are now starting to be affected that this issue is going to gain a lot more attention, especially in the upcoming presidential election. While this is the first time that we have focused specifically on healthcare we have addressed a similar issue when we discussed disabled individuals. When discussing disabled individuals we mentioned how our society is designed for an able-bodied, young man. We discussed the societal responsibility of ensuring that these members of society have the same ability to move around as able-bodied members of society. This idea correlates with the concept of social responsibility concerning adequate healthcare for all.