Health Care versus Medical Care ...

Health care versus medical care, what is the difference?

Health care is care dedicated to preserving health, keeping people healthy. This includes everything from vaccines to advice on how to live healthily to actual needed medical care.

Medical care is care specifically dedicated to treating illnesses and injuries.

What does this mean? Universal health care is health care. It means that, out of the finite amount of money which can be dedicated to keeping people healthy, a large percentage of it is dedicated to telling people how to be healthy, giving people all the vaccines they might need, and monitoring to make sure that they follow these rules (in fact, in England, there are refrigerator checks, where government officials go into peoples' houses and look through their kitchens, to see how much sugar, fat, protein, fiber, etcetera is there, and make reccomendations for improvements in diet. They have similar baby checks for new mothers.) as well as treating very minor ailments, in addition to the care which people actually need. Because the goal of health care is to keep the largest number of people healthy, treatments for serious illnesses, in which the treatment is going to be long and expensive, and the prognosis is less promising, especially if the person is old, the priority of spending money on that person goes down. Perhaps people can be trusted to take care of themselves? Perhaps the money does not need to go into refrigerator checks, or preaching safer sex practises, or telling people not to smoke, or that junk food is bad for them, the fact is that people should be able to live how they want to if they are not hurting anybody else. So what if I want to eat the occasional hot dog? So what if someone wants to smoke? It does not hurt anybody else, they know the risks, let them make their decision. There cannot be a system in which one person's decisions on how to live his or her own life is seen as affecting the whole of society to the point that it must be controlled. Medical care is the only thing that I think people are truly entitled to, and I truly believe that everyone is entitled to medical care. The thing is that universal health care does not ensure that everyone will have access to medical care. It actually lowers the chances that someone will have access to medical care. Cancer survival rates in Europe are SIGNIFICANTLY lower than in the US, 14% lower for breast cancer, 50% lower for colon cancer. What can we do? We have to address the core of the cost problem, for starters. This will not be simple. Malpractice lawsuits send the price of healthcare up dramatically. Insurance programs need to be improved (not sure of everything wrong at this point, collecting problems). Government regulations send the cost of research up dramatically. This leads to more expensive drugs. Obviously some regulations are necessary, but some are excessive (one thing that I feel should be the case is that, in the case of experimental treatments of illnesses with an extremely low prognosis, researchers should be able to go to the human stage of research much earlier, as long as the people consent with full knowledge, cheaper, gives people access to experimental treatments much sooner). Strep tests should be offered as home kits, which is technologically feasable, and would be much, much cheaper, like home pregnancy tests, and blood sugar tests. In fact, tests drive the cost of medical care up dramatically. Not all of them are necessary, all necessary ones should be available, in their cheapest form, but unnecessary ones are performed, often to avoid malpractice lawsuits. Addressing these problems, alone, will send the cost of medical care down dramatically. Another problem is the lack of knowledge. There are institutions currently in place which help people who need medical care obtain it, but people do not know about these! This information must be collected and spread. Combined, these actions should fix the health care problems in this country.