How Important Is Healthcare?

Health care, or healthcare, whichever term you prefer, is the prevention, intervention and management of sickness using the facilities offered by the medical, nursing and allied health professions. According to The WHO, health care embraces all the goods and facilities designed to promote health, including preventive, curative and palliative interventions, whether directed to individuals or to populations. The organized provision of such services may constitute a healthcare system.

Early before the phrase health care was common, the English speaking nations called it just plain medicine or more commonly the health sector but it still meant the provision of a health service to treat and cure sickness and disease. Most developed and even developing countries have a system of health care for all to cater for those who cannot pay. Of course the first country wide healthcare service begun in the UK in 1948 and was called The National Health Service being the first to be organized and funded by the administration.

In Italy, they have a system that works by making everyone pay into a government funded insurance scheme which The WHO consider the second best healthcare system in the world. Canada and Australia have both begun similar systems and have been running since 19.6 and the 1970's respectively both going by the name of Medicare. These systems are almost opposite to the systems currently provided in American and South Africa although there are huge changes taking place in the system used by South Africa. Health care professionals are dedicated to preventing illness and disease principally, but also to treat and protect the long expression health of their patients.

Whether you use the phrase healthcare industry or not, it is still one of the fastest growing around the world with an average cost of 10 percent of gross domestic product it also plays a large part in the economy of any country. Although in 2003 the healthcare costs paid to across the entire healthcare system, consumed 15.3 percent of the GDP of America, the largest of any country in the world and is expected to reach almost twenty percent of GDP by 2016.

Currently in the United States over one hundred eighty million citizens are looking for healthcare and it will be no surprise to learn that it is top of all concerns for those in and seeking employment. The costs of health care in The United States have risen so much that General Motors had looked at filing bankruptcy due to the increasing health care costs wearing down its auto manufacturing division. Luckily it didn't happen after some concessions and compromises made with the unions but it does show how something like this can have an effect on even the largest of companies.

The American healthcare system costs a great deal to employers but it is the number one thing that potential employees look for in an employer and has seen many shifts in how people view working for any given company. Maybe it is time healthcare was looked at in a different way and perhaps called health preservation with an accent on fitness and health to ease the need for a top heavy health care system which is becoming a worldwide problem.

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