AUTHOR INTERVIEW--Yang Liu
Q: Can you describe yourself a bit to us?
A: I’m a high school student from Nanjing. I like sports very much and is interested in social issues related to biology and healthcare.
Q: What inspires you to pay attention to the public health problem?
A: Well, my father is a doctor and he often tells me about some of the global health issues. Moreover, I am considering to study healthcare after I get into college, so apparently I have got to pay attention to these problems.
Q: What do you think youngsters can do in daily life to help facilitate the healthcare system?
A: In my opinion, youngsters can help facilitate the healthcare system by taking part in volunteer programs associated with public healthcare in their free time, such as studying about how sick people sign up for treatments in hospitals, or the procedures it takes for medical workers to make nucleic acid tests. Also, if they come up with ideas that may improve the system, they could write to local hospitals and other medical organizations.
Healthcare Problem We Need To Look At
The issue regarding public healthcare, in this day and age, has never failed to arouse the public concern and at the same time provoke a heated debate among individuals. Since the COVID-19 began, thousands of people have suffered from the terrible disease. While some countries have successfully controlled the pandemic, for instance, China, most countries on the planet haven’t settled the disease. It’s difficult for anyone not to raise 2 questions: what are some of the problems that the world has not solved in fighting against the pandemic? What can we do to improve our healthcare system?
One of the major pitfalls of the healthcare system is the lack of free and high-quality healthcare to the poor, handicapped and senior citizens, who consist of a large fraction of the whole population. The truth is that even if the government offers free treatments to senior citizens and the less privileged, the services or treatment they get are usually below the expected standard. According to profitableventure.com, this is due to corruption from government officials in charge and perhaps in connivance with players in the health care industry. As a result, a host of people die because of poverty and low-quality treatments in their illnesses. To efficiently solve this problem, WHO, which can oversee the healthcare industry and ensure that nothing but the best healthcare services is provided for the senior citizens and the less privileged people, need to help build capacity with various nations that are not competent in tackling their countries’ dilemmas. Moreover, government officials should fully dedicate their efforts into helping their citizens.
The awkward incentive model is also a disturbing matter. In the United States of America and all other nations that operate similar policies, another major problem in healthcare today is the awkward incentives model. It is expected that in health plans, Medicare and Medicaid pay providers for whatever services they deliver, regardless of whether the service truly benefits the patient. This will lead to the situation where patients cannot be properly treated with their diseases. Therefore, they will devote more time and money into curing their illnesses. This situation has also appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic, where numerous people cannot get treatments they want. One possible solution to this problem is to refine the payment systems of healthcare by specifying the services one patient might need. However, this reforming process needs to be supervised in order to ensure its rationality.
Another problem with the healthcare system is that sometimes, patients cannot be treated in time due to complex procedures of registering and paying for expensive medicines, leaving not much money left for other medical services, for example, surgeries and scanning. Despite the fact that these procedures are important, the system still needs to be improved in order to improve its working efficiency, avoiding wasting patients’ time, money, and most important of all, lives. To solve this problem, health departments need to make proper changes in the healthcare system by cutting the useless and time-consuming procedures that may prevent patients from being promptly treated. This problem has been a major issue during the pandemic as well. Many nations in the world cannot make large numbers of nucleic acid tests in a short time. In addition, these tests are often considered to be expensive, resulting in a governmental failure of collecting data of the infected population.
To conclude, governments need to stand out as nations’ leaders and corporate with each other. I believe that as long as we stand together and help patients in need with our full efforts, we will defeat the COVID-19 pandemic in the near future.