Equity in Medical Care

Equity in Medical CareThe healthcare system of any country is normally weighed down by a lot of problems which runs the whole scope from funding to the number of available physicians. Finding a middle ground is an almost impossible task. New Zealand’s healthcare structure while far from being perfect, places high on the list of efficient health systems.

Martin Shore generously contributed this post for us. He is the main author of Ultrasound Technician Training and also writes regularly for other sites like Radiology Technician Schools in California and Ultrasound Technician Course and many other topics. He has done extensive research on the impact of diagnostic procedures to healthcare delivery systems and is quite enthusiastic about sharing his discoveries. His views are expressed in this article although it’s not exactly the same as the views of this site’s owners.

The secret of its seeming success probably lies in the hybrid design. This form has been adopted in an effort to marry both the budget requirement and the health needs of the general population. The majority of the expenses is shouldered by the government but it is helped in a minor way by private payments.

The original design for NZ’s healthcare was universal in nature. Over time, experience dictated that in order to sustain the program and still be able to offer quality care, the leaders had to find means to help it along. And so, the mixed public-private system of delivering care was born. The creation of other governmental agencies like the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) also helped to redirect those requiring specialized care. The ACC’s reach takes on expenses for all accident-related cases, even extending coverage for tourists who are visiting the country provided of course, that they have legal papers with them.

The current system can be considered superior if compared side by side with that of the US. Right now, it’s too early in the game to assess what kind of performance the new health care bill, the ACA, will have on the US health system but judging from the ruckus that the political parties are raising up, it might take awhile to see it fully in action. Now that’s one system that’s better funded, the question is, if their political parties will give it half a chance to work.

The strength of NZ’s health system is that it covers a broad range of medical services that are offered free through public hospitals. Its weakness involves the provision of services that are costly, like diagnostic imaging or cases that require major operations. This usually involves being on a long waiting list that could take awhile to be called on, unless your condition becomes critical in which case, you qualify for emergency care.

Image re-used with permission from Radiologic Technologist Schools

Image re-used with permission from
Radiologic Technologist Schools

It is because of this persistent concern that a back up system of health insurance plans came up. These policies assume the cost of operations and treatments for enrolled individuals. Other complimentary programs include PHARMAC, a government agency that takes over  the cost and regulate the use of medicines. They work on co-payments but offer subsidy for certain groups like those who have community health services card or individuals with higher health plans. Free emergency services are also available through the support of charities and a combination of public and private funds.

It is a fact that there’s still are lot of ground to cover to reach the status of having a truly efficient healthcare system. But what NZ has right now generally works and can be accessed by majority of the population. To have a system that allows you to get medical care and not have to worry if you have the funding or insurance for it is a definite advantage. It’s possibly the closest that you can get to an equitable health care system.

 


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Posted by Jan - August 16, 2012 at 4:57 pm

Categories: General, Health   Tags: ,

Free Market Job Hunting

It’s impossible to look anywhere in the mass media today without hearing about the woeful state of the West’s economy. It’s true that things look pretty bleak at the moment, but there is something that many people haven’t stopped to consider when they whitter on about job loss: the free market will prevail, and it will self-correct.

This post was contributed by guest author Juan Ramirez, who is an expert on jobs and job creation in the free market, as you can see from his website. His posts can be found on a variety of sites across the ‘net, on topics ranging from jobs in business administration to the more obscure civil engineering entry level jobs.

One of the most important things to remember in this latest doom-and-gloom downturn is that it’s not like industry has suddenly collapsed. It’s a hiccup in the free market that is forcing people to figure out how to run businesses on leaner budgets, thanks to the globalization of various elements of the supply chain. It just doesn’t make sense to pay an American worker twice as much as a Chinese worker, when the work is of the same quality. It’s a harsh lesson, but if we try to keep our economy in stasis, we’ll never grow and evolve as a planet. All it requires is a bit of reconsideration of what it means to be employed. Sure, you can still try Pizza Hut jobs or jobs at Budweiser if you want to, but there are a number of international jobs available that pay excellently, they just require a re-consideration of what life looks like in a globalized market.

We no longer live in the world of the nuclear family from the 1950s, because it’s just not sustainable. It might be nice, but it’s just not in the cards. So we can whine about the good old days, or we can accept the fact that change is a necessary part of life and start looking for new ways to thrive in a global market economy. $internationalbusiness has become a fact of life, and we can’t pretend we live in an isolationist state, despite what our terror alerts would have us believe.

While you’re spending time figuring out how you fit into the global jobs market, there are still the pragmatic concerns of putting food on the table and making sure you can keep up with your mortgage payments, of course.

Posted by Jan - July 12, 2012 at 6:52 pm

Categories: Employment   Tags: ,

Private Care for a Private Life

As you probably know by visiting this blog, we here are the antithesis of socialism. The free market should be the determining factor in the world, as the right to bargain in a free market is one of the most basic human rights. That extends to all areas of life, although we also believe there should be one exception: information. Information should be free, since it doesn’t rightfully cost anything. One of the areas that we find this is most true is the areas of health and wellness. Not by coincidence, this access to health information is one of the things that causes a major drag on the economies of countries with socialized medicine.

This guest post was contributed by James Leacock, a noted free-market capitalist who runs this website as well as some health and wellness sites, with posts ranging from types of diabetes all the way to hip pain relief.

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but one of the largest drains on the budgets of nations with socialized healthcare is the amount of time paid out for simple consultations with doctors. As a paradoxical consequence of having seemingly ‘free’ access to doctors and nurses, many people visit the doctor when they could just as easily get the information they need all by themselves for free online. (Note: we’re not advocating self-diagnosis – if you’re in doubt, always get professional medical help). The kinds of things we’re talking about are less serious, things like top healthy snacks and lumbar support braces. Not serious enough to see a doctor for, as when you’re worried about your thyroid levels, but definitely important for the health and well being of those who are interested. It’s a fine line, maybe, but one that needs to exist in order to maintain the value of the time of doctors – another free market inevitability.

It may also seem paradoxical that we’re offering information for free in a free market (that’s not really what a ‘free’ market is all about, after all – it really just means unconstrained). But since there isn’t any particular value inherent to the information itself, we feel that the benefits of the information for keeping the potential customer base happy and interested in consumption far outweigh the potential gains from selling the information itself.

 

Posted by Jan - July 12, 2012 at 6:23 pm

Categories: Health, Life   Tags:

Private Education Should Mean Private Jobs

A nurse completing some continuing education work

We return to one of my favourte topics today here at IHS with a special critique on the topic of private healthcare training vs public healthcare. Thanks to contributing author Joanie Stanis, who is a true expert in the field of healthcare training and education (although you can see from her website that she is more experienced with the American side of things). She posts regularly about free CEUs for nurses, and actually runs an LPN school in NJ, so she clearly knows what she’s talking about.

Thanks, IHS. I’m glad I’ve got the chance to get this off my plate and into the public domain on a site that will properly appreciate it. It’s something that’s bugged me about the NZ healthcare system since I first started looking into the differences between private healthcare and socialized medicine. Since specialized, higher-level education such as nursing degrees and certifications are trained by the private sector. why should the public sector get to benefit from this? The taxpayers are forced to handle the overflow from the private system, which is unfair to them. While a managed economy may have some uses, the free market should decide what’s going on here.

As a contrast, in the American system which I’m more familiar with, LVN programs generate high-quality staff and people are then forced to try to find employment in the free market of private healthcare, since there are no public jobs available when it comes to healthcare. As a former healthcare practitioner, I’m sympathetic to the needs of the poor and needy who can’t always afford the care that they need – but that doesn’t mean we should resort to socialized medicine! There are other, better alternatives.

For example, many people lately have been up in arms calling President Obama’s universal healthcare program a form of socialized medicine – but they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s actually going to be beneficial for nursing schools across the country, from LVN schools in California to accelerated nursing programs in New York, since there’s suddenly going to be an increased demand for private sector workers. As more and more people require care, more trained nurses will have to be found to fill the market gaps. This means that there will be a rise in the number of LPN programs, and the competition to get into top schools such as University of Colorado Nursing and the University of Maryland School of Nursing will become fiercer. We can only come out better off from this situation, since we’re going to be generating more and more qualified nursing professionals who had to work even harder to get where they are.

 

Posted by Jan - July 12, 2012 at 6:04 pm

Categories: Education, Employment   Tags: ,

What we can learn to avoid from Socialist Obamacare

Socialism is a copout, as we all know. The free market should be what defines our options in this world – and never was there a greater champion of this idea than the capitalists of America. But recently, US President Barack Obama has forced the acceptance of a universal health care option.

A Nurse at Work

This is going to bloat their already endangered government, despite the fact that it will create number of jobs in the healthcare and nursing fields. The current state of New Zealand’s healthcare system is woeful – the public is forced to pay for what the private sector should be able to provide. Sure, there are private clinics at the moment if your wait time is too long in the national system, but the burden this places on taxpayers who have no need for public medicine is incredible.

Think of the number of jobs that could be created by privatizing our entire system, the way the United States has always done. I’ve always been in favor of job creation, especially in the healthcare field – nurses are some of the most diligent workers that exist in any field, whether they’re a certified nurses aide or a psychiatric nurse practitioner. We end up hurting the public by making them wait, in some cases, years to get a simple echo that could be done within a week by a private healthcare provider. The main argument, though, is about job creation. Socialized medicine provides some health nursing jobs, absolutely, but they are all at the taxpayers expense. As everyone wants a sweet cushy government job that it’s impossible to get fired from, we wind up with bad nurses who don’t care about their patients. Not all of them operate that way, but enough of them do that it’s noticeable in the system. I’m not talking about them having a bad day, but consistently poor care – especially among nursing staff – is an epidemic. Many of these nurses would have been fired if they worked for a private contractor, which would increase the demand for qualified nurses, and increase the pay for all of them. Do you know what the average salary of a nurse practitioneris? Far, far more than it should be, for the level of care they’re providing – and all at the taxpayers expense!

Just because we can now accept private care as an option doesn’t fix the system, however. The way these problems begin cause a spillover effect from the public to the private sector, causing a flood of underqualified and undermotivated nursing staff.

 

Posted by Jan - June 28, 2012 at 7:15 pm

Categories: General, Health   Tags: ,