Why are Americans so worked up about health care reform? Statements such as "don't touch my Medicare" or "everyone should have access to advanced health care irrespective of cost" are in my estimation uninformed and visceral responses that indicate a poor understanding of our health and wellness care system's history, its current and future resources and the funding challenges that America faces going forward. While we all wonder how the health care system has reached what some make reference to as a crisis stage. Let's make an effort to take a number of the emotion out of your debate by briefly examining how healthcare in this country emerged and how that has formed our thinking and culture about health care. With that as a foundation let's look at the pros and cons of the Obama administration health care reform proposals and let's look at the concepts put forth by the Republicans?

Access to advanced health care services is something we are able to all agree will be a good thing for this country. Experiencing a significant illness is one of life's major challenges also to face it without the means to shell out the dough is positively frightening. But once we shall see, once we know the facts, we shall find that achieving this goal will never be easy without our individual contribution.

These are the themes I'll touch on to try to make some sense out of what's happening to American health care and the steps we can personally try make things better.

A recent history of American health care - what has driven the costs so high?
Important elements of the Obama healthcare plan
The Republican view of health care - free market competition
Universal access to advanced healthcare - a worthy goal however, not easy to achieve
what can we do?
First, let's get a little historical perspective on American health care. This is not intended to be an exhausted consider that history but it will give us an appreciation of the way the health care system and our expectations for this developed. What drove costs higher and higher?

To begin, let's turn to the American civil war. In that war, dated tactics and the carnage inflicted by modern weapons of the era combined to cause ghastly results. Not generally known is that a lot of the deaths on both sides of this war were not the result of actual combat but from what happened following a battlefield wound was inflicted. In the first place, evacuation of the wounded moved at a snail's pace which caused severe delays in treating the wounded. Secondly, many wounds were subjected to wound care, related surgeries and/or amputations of the affected limbs and this often led to the onset of massive infection. So you might survive a battle wound and then die as a result of medical care providers who although well-intentioned, their interventions were often quite lethal. High death tolls can be ascribed to everyday sicknesses and diseases in a period when no antibiotics existed. Altogether something like 600,000 deaths occurred from all causes, over 2% of the U.S. population at the time!

Let's skip to the initial 1 / 2 of the 20th century for a few additional perspective also to bring us up to more modern times. Following the civil war there have been steady improvements in American medicine in both understanding and treatment of certain diseases, new surgical techniques and in physician education and training. But for the most part the best that doctors can offer their patients was a "wait and see" approach. Medicine could handle bone fractures and increasingly attempt risky surgeries (now largely performed in sterile surgical environments) but medicines were not yet available to handle serious illnesses. healthy lifestyle tips The majority of deaths remained the consequence of untreatable conditions such as for example tuberculosis, pneumonia, scarlet fever and measles and/or related complications. Doctors were increasingly alert to heart and vascular conditions, and cancer however they had next to nothing with which to take care of these conditions.