United States
The United States has a two-tier public-private health system but the majority of the population cannot gain access to the public provision tiers. Health care provided directly by the government is limited to military and veteran families and certain Native American tribes. Certain cities and towns also provide free care directly, but only to those who cannot afford to pay. Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children's Health Insurance Program pay for health care obtained at private facilities, but only for the elderly, disabled, and children in poor families.
The debate over health care reform in the United States has included a proposal for a "public option" or "Medicare for All" - a government-run insurance program, available to all U.S. citizens, that would compete with private insurance plans. The stated goal of such a program would be to reduce costs through vigorous competition, while preserving choice of insurance coverage for patients. Opposition to this option has centered around concerns that the government program would have an unfair advantage (a removed profit goal and a budget limited only by taxation and Congress appropriations), and that it could thus result in the elimination of private health insurance through attrition.
Further information: Health care in the United States and ObamacareRead more about this topic: Two-tier Health Care
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nations agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a familys financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United Statesas much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (19081973)
“The real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“... it is probable that in a fit of generosity the men of the United States would have enfranchised its women en masse; and the government now staggering under the ballots of ignorant, irresponsible men, must have gone down under the additional burden of the votes which would have been thrown upon it, by millions of ignorant, irresponsible women.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (18151884)
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (18191892)