United States
Health and Safety in United States
The United States of America hast he 3rd highest public healthcare expenditure per capita, yet the better health care providers are largely owned and operated by the private sector, except for Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, Children’s Health Insurance Program and Veterans Health Administration. As this is the case, still 15% of the population is uninsured, and a portion of which are underinsured or who are less insured and given less benefits compared to those who are fully insured.
The USA has higher infant mortality rate than most of the world’s industrialized nations. In the 2008 Commonwealth Fund report, the United States ranked last in the category of quality of healthcare along with 19 other countries, and yet they spend so much of their budget in healthcare.
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences said that “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths per year,” while a 2009 study in Harvard believes that the figure is relevantly bigger, finding 44,800 excess deaths annually in the country. All of these are due to the lack of concentration and priority on healthcare. Adding up to the scenario, there are no government-owned medical facilities, but there are local government-owned facilities open to the public.
Rates of abortion and early pregnancy, teenage pregnancy at that, have also increased. As the teenagers are now in shallow understanding of sexual intercourse and having to do it with the opposite sex, more and more teenage girls try abortion and/or keep their babies and give birth at an early age of 13.
