Читать книгу Kelly Vana's Nursing Leadership and Management - Группа авторов - Страница 104

In the United States, health care insurance is one of the most significant factors in facilitating access to health care services. Recently, the number of people covered by insurance as well as the breadth and depth of health insurance coverage has decreased. According to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation‐Health Research and Educational Trust Annual Employer Survey (2018), the average yearly costs for employer‐sponsored health insurance in 2018 are $6,896 for single coverage and $19,616 for family coverage. The average single premium increased by 3% and the average family premium increased by 5% in the last year. Workers' wages increased by 2.6% and inflation increased by 2.5% over the past year. The average insurance premium for family coverage has increased by 20% since 2013 and by 55% since 2008.

In the past, American health insurance companies have routinely rejected applicants with a preexisting condition. The insurance companies often denied claims. If a customer was hit by a truck and faced big medical bills, the insurance company dug through the records looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim was still in the hospital (Reid, 2009). Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all applicants, and they can't cancel insurance as long as premiums are paid. Everyone is mandated to buy insurance to give the plans an adequate pool of rate payers. The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage. In many ways, foreign health care models are not really foreign to America, because our health care system uses elements of all of them. In Britain, the government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. In Germany, premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. In Canada; everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. In the world's poor nation, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay, stay sick or die. Seven hundred thousand Americans are forced into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero; Britain, zero; Japan, zero; and Germany, zero (Reid, 2009).