Universal Health Care Insurance & Neighborhood Healthcare Centers / Video

Universal Health Care Centers -- Are Physicians Doing Their Part? / Video. Film on why health care workers and health care centers are needed to care for the uninsured, homeless and poor. From the public domain film, "A Right to Health". Creative Commons license: Public Domain. Universal health care is health care coverage that is extended to all eligible residents of a governmental region and often covers medical, dental, and mental health care. These programs vary in their structure and funding mechanisms. Typically, most costs are met via a single-payer health care system or national health insurance. Universal health care is provided in all wealthy, industrialized countries, except for the United States. It is also provided in many developing countries and is the trend worldwide. Universal health care is a broad concept that has been implemented in several ways. The common denominator for all such programs is some form of government action aimed at extending access to health care as widely as possible. Most countries implement universal health care through legislation, regulation and taxation. Legislation and regulation direct what care must be provided, to whom, and on what basis. Usually some costs are borne by the patient at the time of consumption but the bulk of costs come from a combination of compulsory insurance and tax revenues. Some programs are paid for entirely out of tax revenues. In some cases, government involvement also includes directly managing the health care system, but many countries use mixed public-private systems to deliver universal health care. The United States is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not have a universal health care system. The government directly covers 27.8% of the population through health care programs for the elderly, disabled, military service families and veterans, children, and some of the poor, through Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and TRICARE. Indirectly, various governmental entities in the United States also contribute towards the healthcare coverage of many millions of federal, state, and local government employees and their families who are covered by traditional employer-based group insurance coverage with insurance premiums often substantially subsidized by the government employer using public tax revenues. Federal law ensures public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay. However, this unfunded mandate has contributed to a health care safety net that some analyses say is increasingly strained. Certain types of medical spending and particularly health insurance benefit from significant tax subsidies; in particular, employer-sponsored health insurance is a non-taxable benefit. In all, government spending accounted for 45.1% of total health spending in the U.S. in 2005. Current estimates put U.S. health care spending at approximately 15% of GDP, the highest in the world. A study of international health care spending levels in the year 2000, published in the health policy journal Health Affairs, found that while the U.S. spends more on health care than other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the use of health care services in the U.S. is below the OECD median by most measures. The authors of the study concluded that the prices paid for health care services are much higher in the U.S.. An estimated 84.7% of citizens have some form of health insurance coverage, either through their employer, purchased individually, or through government sources. The number of uninsured, at 45.7 million in 2007, decreased slightly from 2006, because government programs covered nearly 3 million more people. It is projected that the current economic downturn and rising unemployment rate likely will cause the number of uninsured to grow by at least 2 million in 2008. One study estimates that about 25% of the country's uninsured, or roughly another 11 million people, are eligible for government health care programs, but they are not enrolled. However, assuring adequate financing to cover those who are eligible remains a challenge.

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YouTube | January 20, 2009

Tags:. .tricare. .unfunded. .schip. .compulsory. .denominator