My Thinking Has Changed, and the U.S Healthcare System Should Too

When I think back on the entire course and what my biggest take away has been, I would have to say that it is my feelings toward the U.S. healthcare system. I had previously been ignorant on how the U.S. healthcare system works. This is largely because my family has good health insurance and it is not something that I have ever had to worry about. But after reading T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America I saw how our healthcare system leaves millions of people without insurance should they make too much money to qualify for Medicare but too little to afford health insurance. I began to see that the U.S. healthcare system has not been designed to serve all of its citizens. This theme came up over and over again when looking at how the United States handles practices involving medicine.

When I first read about what happened to Nikki White, who was brought up in multiple conversations throughout the course, I felt appalled. She was just one of millions of examples of people hung out to dry because of where they fall socioeconomically. We saw this when we learned that medical bills are the biggest cause of bankruptcy in the United States. This also became apparent when as a group we discussed our own experiences with health care and everyone could cite a time when they or someone they knew didn’t go to the doctor because they didn’t want to pay for the bill that would come after. I had known about socialized medicine before the class, but upon reading The Healing of America I realized the stark contrast between how the U.S. handles healthcare compared to many other developed countries. While we leave millions uninsured, countries like France, England, and Japan make sure that everyone has equal access to healthcare, regardless of how much money they make.

I also believe that the U.S. healthcare system was designed to only serve certain people by how certain illnesses are viewed in the western medical world. For instance, we learned how addiction is blamed on the victim, rather than the circumstances that may have caused a person to turn to substance use in the first place. Programs designed to help addicts can be expensive, and they are typically a one-size-fits-all scenario so that if an individual does not get better from rehabilitation or a program, the assumption is that the individual is at fault, rather than the program. We saw this specifically with AA, which caters to those who have spiritual beliefs and faults those who do not fulfill the program’s idea of success. The U.S. healthcare system does this in almost all forms of any illness that does not have a clear physical origin, such as how people who suffer from depression and other mental illnesses are viewed. Yes, this is something I knew before, but I have realized through taking this course that it is not just individuals who create stigma around mental illness, but it is a system that puts the responsibility of mental health on the sufferers, and this perpetuates the stigma.

From everything I have written, it probably sounds like my take-away from this class has been to hate on the U.S. healthcare system. But that isn’t true. Yes, I now have more knowledge on how healthcare in the U.S. works as compared to other systems around the world, but what I’ve learned is that I have always looked at healthcare around the world through the lens of someone who has grown up in the U.S., assuming that what my country did was “right.” I have now learned that there are so many other ways to do things and that I should not look at everything in healthcare through a biomedical lens. Being more open-minded has definitely been what I have taken away most from this course. That, and a desire to see some serious changes to the U.S. healthcare system.

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