How to write a nursing essay on the current Issues in Health Policy

How to write a nursing essay on the current Issues in Health Policy

The U.S. healthcare system mixes private and public, non-profit and for-profit insurers, and healthcare workers. Adults aged 65 years and above, some individuals with disabilities, veterans, and low-income people are facilitated by the Medicare and Medicaid programs funded by the federal government. Medicaid gives states federal matching funding for tailoring healthcare services to low-income families, the blind, and children up to 18 years. On the other hand, the children’s insurance programs that exclusively cover children from low-income families in some states operate as an extension of Medicaid. With this health system financing, the U.S. experiences the highest levels of cancer survival due to its aggressive cancer preemptive screening and treatment. On the contrary, the U.S. healthcare system has incomplete coverage for its citizenry, with high expenditure levels per person and unequal distribution of resources and outcomes among population groups across the county.

In comparing the U.S. and U.K. healthcare systems, the U.S. has built a network of high-performance, low-cost centers for high-performance procedures such as Cancer therapy and heart transplantation procedures, which in the U.K. are fewer. There is a modernized professional learning system in the U.S. through continuous medical education funded by the pharmaceutical industries comprising traditional learning methods and experts. In the U.K. is common practice due to the tradition of healthcare workers having personal development plans. With the high private financing of health in the U.S., several types of equipment are available, and specialists are trained, resulting in more complicated procedures being conducted successfully. In the U.K., the national institute for clinical excellence uses cost-utility data to help decide on innovations to be introduced into the NHS and incorporate public values into decisions and regulation of surgical procedures (Shrank et al., 2021). Also, the national patient safety agency in the U.K. makes healthcare safer and easily available to the citizenry without making payments.

Despite high healthcare financing by the federal government and private insurers in the U.S., which has increased the rate of healthcare access, affordability, and equity, there is still a large and uninsured population of 8.9% of the total population in 2016, which is expected to rise to 37.2 million in 2028 (Hegwer, 2017). Healthcare affordability has, over time, reduced at an unsustainable rate due to the continuous growing national debt, strained federal and local budgets, increased financial insecurity for Americans, and stagnant wages. This tendency creates a marked disparity in access to health.

For a sustained healthcare system, congress should expand insurance coverage to the uninsured population by passing legislation to enhance deficit spending and alternative revenue sources or revenue transfers, adopt policies to fully implement the home-based care system, which has been proven to be cheap, improve the affordability of drugs and therapeutics, develop a high-value workforce through reasonable remunerations and incentives and accelerate the transition to value-based care using Medicare and Medicaid (Hegwer, 2017).

Nurses play a critical role in controlling healthcare costs and influencing policy-making by congress. A head nurse leads each nursing unit to control labor costs, which form the largest component of the hospital labor budget. Nurse leaders, therefore, play a defining role in achieving cost savings and ensuring the financial stability of healthcare setups alongside advocating for unnecessary treatments or medications prescribed to patients (Mason et al., 2020). In addition, Nurse Managers participate in policy formulation stages to reduce Medicare Advantage overpayments, capping hospital prices, and equalizing Medicare payments regardless of the site of care.

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