Health Systems Reaction - Research Paper Example

The first article (the “ANA’s Health System Reform Agenda”) details the steps that have been taken to lobby the respective powers that help to govern the current state of the United States healthcare system. As such, the article sets forward the optimistic premise that changes to the current system, almost regardless of their scope, as long as they moved towards a more regulated and government centralized plan/single payer option, the net result would be highly beneficial to both the affordability of health care and the overall ease and work level associated with health care providers (Emmanuel, 2008).

The article launches into a series of metrics that work to show the debacle that the American healthcare system currently finds itself. By presenting these facts, the article hopes to present a powerful logical case for why the current system is broken and needs urgent repair. Furthermore, the argument offers some of the main categories of the current healthcare system that should be addressed if any healthcare reform is to be initiated (Denis et al, 2012). These include: access, affordability, availability, quality, cost, and workforce.

Therefore, the analysis makes a careful weighting of each of these factors as they relate to the overall picture of what a better healthcare system might include. The second article provided (“The False Premise of Reform”) does not spend as much time offering a solution to the woes of the current healthcare system as it does criticizing the waste and excess that is part and parcel of what came to be known as Obamacare. As such, the article goes in depth comparing what the promises of the Affordable Healthcare Act were in the beginning and how these actually worked out to create another government run leviathan that although promising many reforms as they relate to the management and implementation of a nationwide healthcare plan, they in fact create a glut of waste and even more potential for private firms to exploit the clients.

The article further argues that perhaps the greatest pitfall of the Affordable Care Act is that it requires everyone to “buy” health insurance as opposed to what at true “single payer’ healthcare plan could have provided. In effect, rather than weaken the position of the HMOs and health insurance providers by strongly regulating how they are allowed to operate, the government in effect has given them even more latitude to operate within the economy as every US citizen is now required to use their product.

In this way, the team of healthcare professionals proffer that the Affordable Healthcare Act has not served to benefit the citizen or the uninsured and has merely compounded an already worsening problem. One important point of agreement that these two pieces have is that they both relate to the idea of a single payer system as one which should be the ideal standard towards which all health care reform should strive (LaPierre, 2012). In this way, both articles embrace the ideal of the single payer system but the means to how this should be achieved are strongly divergent as the methods of analysis utilized in the pieces are quite different on a number of levels.

It is also important to note