Affordable Healthcare Solutions

Affordable health care solutions are designed to make it possible for everyone to have health insurance without having to pay through the nose for it. These days affordable health care is hard to come by, with many companies opting to either only make health insurance available to those who can pay the entire or most of the premium, or in some cases not offering health insurance at all. For those who are self-employed or have opted to pay for their health insurance or health care themselves, they are finding that it is increasingly difficult to find affordable health care options.

Depending on your income, there are different types of affordable health care. Some clinics are now working on a sliding scale, letting you pay for your care based on how much you gross annually. This isn't always a good solution, particularly if you are someone who lives from paycheck to paycheck. However, for someone who cannot afford health insurance, this is one way that you may be able to cut back on your health care costs. Some companies are able to get reduced premiums depending on the number of employees they can get signed up for a particular health insurance program, and many employees are taking advantage of this as one affordable health care solution. Some health insurance companies are actually rewarding companies with employees who have healthy habits by offering the option of reduced premiums. These come into play when it can be proven that there are no smokers in a company, or that employees are exercising and eating well. Many hospitals also offer affordable health care solutions by having charity programs that allow low-income patients to get the health care they need for free or at a cost that is affordable to them based on their income. This is a little different than the sliding scale method because there actually are patients that get a 100 percent discount and do not have to pay their bill. The Swedish Hospitals and clinics in Seattle, Washington, have such a program.

Feminists have long been fighting for low-cost and the easily available birth control pills at clinics for low-income women and college-age girls for the last few decades. This is an ongoing fight to make birth control available to all women, and it took a serious setback in 2005 when legislation was passed that increased the price of birth control pills in university health clinics. Feminists have also been fighting for affordable access to annual exams including pap smears, and mammograms for women over 40. They state that if these were provided health care costs would actually go down because women would be practicing preventative medicine by getting these exams yearly rather than waiting until they think there is a problem to go to the doctor because they are afraid they won't be able to afford it.

There are people daily being turned away from hospitals and or denied medical care because they don't have health insurance and cannot pay the exorbitant up-front payment that hospitals are asking for before they will treat people. A story in the Wall Street Journal in April 2008 told about a woman who was diagnosed withlLeukemia who had limited health insurance coverage. Since her insurance would only cover a small percentage of the immediate care she needed, the hospital demanded that she pay $105,000 up front before they would treat her. She was able to come up with $45,000 of that amount, but the hospital still refused to treat her unless she could come up with the other $60,000. They finally agreed to treat her, but hospitals demanding huge sums from those with limited or no health insurance before they will treat a person is becoming the norm. The obvious significance is that America has a broken health care system with fewer and fewer options for the poor and those with limited health insurance. More people are dying earlier and more people are ignoring symptoms that could be indicative of serious health problems because they are afraid they will be turned away or asked to come up with large amounts of money that they cannot produce.

While socialized medicine does appear to be the best option to provide an affordable health care solution and solve America's rapidly growing health care crisis, it is still important that we study other industrialized countries that have socialized medicine. This way we can make sure that when or if we do implement it, we do so in such a way as to avoid any mistakes or problems that these other countries encountered either when they first began such a system or as they have developed over time. Not getting a handle on exactly what implementing socialized medicine into a country which has had medicine for profit since its inception would be a serious mistake and could possibly make the problem worse in the long run.