14 DAY TRIAL // The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan institution, has recently announced that the number of uninsured Americans in the US is expected to grow to 54 million in roughly 10 years, from the current number of 45 million. The report says that the current economic crisis will only make things worse, seeing how more and more citizens will start losing their jobs and will have no money to pay for insurance, or for their home mortgages, for that matter.
There are those American families in which both parents have lost their jobs, and now find themselves unable to pay for the expenses generated by their medical conditions, as well as by mortgages and children's education. If one or both of them suffer from long-term conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressures, and the likes, then the expenses go way up. Such a family can only manage to cope with expenses for one or two years, depending on how much money they have managed to save during the time they have been employed.
In fact, there are those who consider that the real effects of the crisis will start manifesting themselves in one or two years, when people who lost their job in late 2008 or at the beginning of this year will exhaust all their life savings and will begin to lose their houses and health. The main problem about this is not that individuals have insufficient money to pay for health coverage, for example, but that they have to do it in the first place.
Because the entire health care service is private, it's focused on competition and winning money. Sadly, in order to do this, many managers cut expenses in the most vulnerable sector, namely that of the patients. And insurance companies also spare money when it comes to treating clients, by making up all sorts of excuses to avoid paying for their medical conditions. Needless to say, this is the most expensive health care system in the world, where individuals pay enormous sums of money on overpriced services and medication that were supposed to be free in the first place.
At this point, most Americans turn to Obama for help, on account of the fact that he ran for the White House on a campaign built on reform, in both the energetic and the health sector. If he manages to come through, then several million Americans could get their coverage back. However, the true solution to this problem is creating a free-for-all system. Sure, some will lose their money, but what's a few bucks to the people who are already billionaires on account of the suffering of others?