Unnecessary spending & unequal dispersion

Looking at the pie chart to the right, we see that hospitals take up a big chunk of national healthcare spending. Not that hospitals don’t need the money—it is expensive to manage and keep a hospital running—but a lot of times they are not run efficiently. People go into the hospital when they really don’t need to, and that costs money. Like we discussed before in class, many people get doubly-immunized simply because their immunization records could not be found…and that costs money. A physician who’s unproductive or makes a bad call in diagnosing a patient will also cost the system a lot of money. There’s a lot of unnecessary spending going on within the healthcare infrastructure.

I think we should also be concerned about who exactly is receiving healthcare and prevention services. More often than not, the low-income population is not getting either. And if they are receiving healthcare, the quality of the services they receive leaves much room for improvement. Oftentimes, education (schooling) itself is a form of prevention, and that is something which those with low SES simply don’t have. Even if they are insured, that still doesn’t guarantee these people quality health care, or even access to it. Just because nationally we spend trillions of dollars to pay for health care doesn’t mean that everyone is benefiting from it, which is hardly “justice”…I guess it sounds better in ideology than in practice.