Assignment 4: Healthcare System

The Dartmouth Atlas Project is a study on how the quality and costs of healthcare vary in different geographic regions of the country; and the purpose of this research is to determine which are the most effective healthcare systems that "can save the most lives at the lower costs".

In the beginning of the video they explain how supply drives demand in order to show how the increase in health services has made the costs of healthcare rise even higher. It has gotten to the point where the system pays for the services, so providers don't care if the patients need the services and the patients don't question what kind of healthcare are they receiving because they're not paying for it directly. This is how they found out that communities like those in Grand Junction Colorado and Seattle proved to have the best healthcare because of the preventive and cooperative nature of their systems, where all doctors get paid the same fees for given services so that they can take the time to evaluate their patients holistically and work out a plan with them to reduce their number of visits to the hospital, lowering costs and at the same time increasing the number of patients that they can attend.

If we live or die depends on our health, and having these high stakes at the table makes access to healthcare a right rather than a privilege . I understand that health services must be retributed and that they are expensieve because of their complexity, which is why I believe that communities need to work together in order to promote health and work out a system that assures that everyone has the same opportunities to be healthy and have a lifestyle in which their basic needs can be satisfied.

I found really impressive how the Group Health Cooperative in Seattle uses technology in order to keep electronic records in order to tell what services are needed and which ones are not so that the system can be more effective. They take information with previous patients with similar conditions to draw conclussions and come up with a methodology that makes diagnosis much more easier, so therefore treatment is less extensieve, more effective and less expensieve.

In Venezuela (which is where I am from) the system is very different. Healthcare is not as expensieve as it is in the United States, and still most people are insured by their employers or private companies. In the worst case scenario middle income families can always afford to pay for it directly from their pockets, and they are free clinics for the poorest sectors. However, the quality is not the same, mostly due to the lack of technology and to the fact that the population is too large for such a small number of facilities and providers, which makes the system ineffective. People wait for more than three hours to see a doctor (even with an appointment), and sometimes the doctor doesn't even have time to see them. But once they are attended, the patient does receive a holistic examination and an appropriate treatment. The price of pharmaceuticals is continuously increasing and the poorest families can't afford them sometimes, but this is because of the raging inflation that is taking over everything, not just medications.