Health Care System in Israel - Research Paper Example

Even with the government allocating relatively low funding to national health care as part of measures to cut costs, Israel still managed to build a quality health care system ranked among the best in the world. Among the different medical areas, the country has performed exceptionally well in the diagnosis of chronic diseases thus preventing frequent hospitalizations unnecessarily.   Such include cases like diabetes, which usually receive appropriate attention and early diagnosis significantly reducing the rate of complications as well as chances of hospitalization (Brinkley, 2007, p. 27).     

The government’s commitment and dedication to ensuring a healthy nation have been a key input to the success of the program. One other reason why proper execution of healthcare programs has yielded fruit is the fact that Israel benefited a lot from the influx of doctors and nurses from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s through most are now aging and exiting from the profession. The country’s health care is based on universal coverage, substantial federal government control, and oversight and is a managed healthcare system. The country’s health care model requires citizens to be members of one of the four insurance plans. The plans are by law mandated to meet certain minimum service quality requirements and are not expected to reject clients simply because of certain preexisting conditions (Brinkley, 2007, p. 20).   

 Even though the management of healthcare has been such a success, several areas of improvement have been suggested from various quarters. One such area is the expansion of the assessment of medical data by insurers from community health fund clinics to include monitoring improvements in care. Additionally, hospitals have also been urged to enhance the quality of treatment and accessibility of hospital data by healthcare professionals. There has not also been enough competition among providers of healthcare and also on quality among health care funds. Increased competition in these areas has been proposed as another avenue for better health care in the country. In terms of equity in care provision, there are a number of gaps based on ethnic groups and between the rich and the poor. To enhance accessibility to care and improve equity, additional efforts are inevitable.   

Israel and the American Healthcare Systems 

The American healthcare system is majorly a public-private partnership arrangement with a majority of Americans covered by their employers. There are more than 5000 hospitals in the United States majority operating as nonprofit private entities. A good number of Americans did not have health insurance but with the enactment of the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA), the number without insurance is projected to significantly reduce.

Both the American and the Israel health systems employ both public and private sources of funding with a mix of government and non-governmental organizations.  Both systems are among the few in the world that utilize extensive use of competing managed care organizations though faced with shortages in healthcare professionals particularly physicians and nurses (Brinkley, 2007, p. 23-24).

One of the notable differences between Israel’s and America’s healthcare systems is the issues of financing and coverage as well as cost control in health care delivery and management. Israel spends far much less than the United States because of its model that embraces a heavy role of government control and a requirement that everyone is covered. The idea is not just to provide healthcare to more people but find innovative ways to manage health care costs. There are also differences under financing and coverage in terms of the extent of premiums and taxes, risk adjustments for government-financed plans, nature, and scope of benefits packages as well as financing of new technologies. Another major difference between the two systems is the structure of the insurance market in terms of nature and number of insurers, the extent of choice, care management, and the basis of competition among insurers (Brinkley, 2007, p.24).

In terms of the care delivery system, there are differences in the level of hospital ownership and hospital conditions under different circumstances, responsibility for hospitalized patients, hospital physicians as well as primary care physicians, quality monitoring, professional liability, and care of difficult conditions among patients. Other differences relate to the healthcare workforce with regard to the scope of nursing practice, medical education costs, incomes of different professional cadres, duration of licenses and certificates as well as the role of collective bargaining (Brinkley, 2007, p. 25).    Miscellaneous differences between these two systems also include issues such as dealing with the needs of new immigrants, health promotion and disease prevention, reimbursement systems among hospitals as well as on areas of medical research.