Unhealthy Health System

The first time that I have seen health system as a terrible issue in the US was a few weeks after arriving into US. My friend was telling me if I get any medical problem, I would be gone financially, if I am not insured. I didn’t notice till I saw an Asian person whose leg was broken in an accident, he went to his home country for operation and came back, even though he had to miss the important exams of the semester. Later he told me that the whole cost with ticket and hospital over there was almost one 100-th of what could cost here. I was totally shocked and frightened.

Since then I started thinking why is like that. Once I just read Truman’s pre-election speeches in 1940’s. Surprisingly I saw almost the same kind of talk and promises that I had seen during the last year of presidential election. It seemed for me that during at least last 60 years, there was hopelessly no progress at all in the system. I don’t really know why the situation is not the same in Europe, Canada or all other developed countries. Funny thing that I couldn’t imagine when I was back home – and nobody back home would believe it – is that about 40 out of 280 millions (14%) of US population do not have medical insurance (Almost close to this rate is true for hunger!!! population in the US). In another way, if something just goes seriously wrong for them, they should just forget about life!

I would easily say that health care system back home in Iran was much better than what I see here. Even though the salary is less in there, but the ratio of the salary over the same medical operation is much higher there. Some say that the reason is because of the strong abilities to sue medical system here and insurance companies take a lot of money from hospitals, they therefore need to charge patients in turn. But how about other countries like in Europe? Can’t you sue the hospital if anything goes wrong?

Is it really hard to fix this terrible and important issue?