Properly Understanding U.S. Public Health and Its Flaws

The United States healthcare system is an incredibly large and complex ecosystem. Billions of dollars, millions of people, and vast amounts of effort and energy flow through its ranks. It is perhaps one of the most fundamental and wide-reaching systems in the USA, affecting virtually every person in the country every year.

It has created incredible advances in technology, knowledge, and best practice that have quite literally made significant differences for healthcare around the world. It manages vast amounts of resources. It accomplishes incredible feats and saves countless lives every day.

However, it also has incredible room for improvement. This article explores how the various elements of the system work together, how to better understand the places where it is susceptible to problems, and how to think about improving it.

The Various Entities that Make Up Public Healthcare in the United States

The healthcare system involves a huge variety of entities and players. Here are a few of the broad player categories that make up its intricate landscape:

Federal oversight and government agencies play a large role in how the healthcare system works. Legislation and regulations dictate how different players on the landscape can interact and operate. The purpose of these regulatory structures is to keep various stakeholder groups safe and well-cared for.

In theory, they also mitigate monopolies, conflicts of interest, hazards, fraud, discrimination, and coercion to name just a few. Sometimes government involvement works better hypothetically than in practice. Understanding governmental influence on other parts of the healthcare landscape is imperative to understanding the system as a whole.

Public and private medical care facilities make up another indispensable part of the healthcare landscape. These facilities include hospitals and hospital systems, outpatient practices, clinics, publicly funded health offices, and many more. These entities are the physical places and spaces where a majority of today’s healthcare activity happens (though the increasing popularity of telehealth and other remote health options has diffused that concentration slightly).

These various types of medical facilities and resources act as another vital part of the healthcare ecosystem. The balance and differentiations between public systems and private entities intensifies the complexity and creates more nuanced relationships between these entities and other parts of the puzzle.

Academia makes up another important part of the healthcare landscape. Higher education institutions, research facilities, and university-run hospitals contribute unique assets to the healthcare ecosystem than any of the other entity types discussed here. They create and test new procedures, instruments, tools, ideas, and more that raises the field of medicine to broader and better heights.

This part of the healthcare landscape is also responsible for infusing healthcare with personnel – training up nursing and M.D. students, pharmacology students, medical and bio-engineers, and more. These all have a valuable part to play in keeping the healthcare landscape moving in the right direction.

Awareness organizations and health-focused nonprofits provide a last broad category of entities that serve and propel healthcare. This group of stakeholders is far more likely to work with traditionally underserved or disadvantaged populations. They can be publicly funded or self-fundraised.

These range from small, informal health awareness drives organized by local community members to massive international operations with huge operating budgets. Their cohesive trait is that they usually operate outside the areas of for-profit or insurance-reimbursed healthcare provision. These entities contribute to various healthcare initiatives to raise awareness, make healthcare services more accessible, and provide help for those who need it most.

Elements That Shape Public Health

Now that we’ve explored some of the players in the industry, let’s look at some of the items that form a sort of currency those players use to accomplish their various roles and responsibilities.

Policy making and lobbying have a huge part to play within the world of healthcare. Policies are often created within incredibly pressured environments. This is because various stakeholders have large, competing interests that need balancing. Different entities within healthcare can have opposing ideas or priorities that guide how they think things should be done. The process of writing and re-writing policy and creating the rules that dictate aspects of healthcare is where those varying priorities often meet to do battle.

Another important part of this massive equation is resources. These raw elements include money, incentives, material goods like pharmaceuticals and physical assets, and staff (access to the medical professionals needed to keep the whole thing running). Obviously, the economic considerations created when these various resource types are required for the system to operate are massive and complicated.

Another large influence over how the system operates is the public’s general awareness about various aspects of healthcare. When many average individuals don’t go to the doctor’s office or possess an average level of health knowledge necessary to prompt interacting with the healthcare system when advisable, this hampers how effectively the system can catch and mitigate risks when they are small and manageable. It also creates more opportunity for unsustainable health realities, sudden outbreaks, low levels of wellbeing, and more.

Finally, the various players in the healthcare system are knit together by infrastructure and subsystems that dictate the interactions and engagement between those players. Communication channels, partnerships and relationships between various entities, deals and agreements, marketplaces, and more define how the various elements within the landscape interact with each other.

When Things Need to Be Improved

The United States healthcare system has experienced tremendous amounts of difficulty and upheaval over the past 3-5 years. The COVID-19 pandemic created massive strains on facility capacity, staffing issues, regulatory concerns, and more. However, the healthcare system’s problems didn’t originate there. Here are three areas that currently affect our healthcare system on a wide scale and need to be addressed:

A lack of effective advocacy for necessary change, including better transparency, inclusion, and healthcare equity across various populations in the States. Though some of these issues have made their way into more widespread public comprehension, these problems are still systemic and have not been addressed despite the beginnings of higher average awareness.

Unsustainable costs for even basic healthcare coverage. The current state of the United States healthcare system makes fundamental health services completely inaccessible for large numbers of our population.

The overly politicized nature of health education and care. A number of healthcare concerns and topics have found themselves in the forefront of political discourse and division in recent years. This can make it very difficult to provide the public with appropriate and adequate access to healthcare services.

The U.S. public healthcare system is vast and faces many challenges in its coming months and years. Though it is complicated, complex, and sometimes systemically flawed, helping various stakeholders work together and collaborate on solving some of its deepest pain points can help it move towards providing greater healthcare effectiveness and access for the entire country.