Public Health Care

Public Health Care

Define Public Health Care: A cost- effective health care system setup to support the health care needs of a community or population funded directly by the government or a government approved committee. In such a health care system funding is financed either through tax deduction or a national health insurance scheme.

Benefits of public health care can help in assuring a healthy living of the society. Public health doctors provide treatment to the entire community through fair practices rather than focusing on individual patients thereby ensuring a healthy community. Individuals or families get more and better health care services for a lot lesser price than other health care systems.
Populations have an easy access to the hospitals or clinical services that are run by the publicly funded health care agency. Public health care benefits the society with subsidized rates on medicines and other health care products and services.

Though such a health care system has its benefits, we cannot neglect the cons of public health care. It can be inefficiently managed within the clinical centres, thus providing health services at a snail`s pace. Public health care reform would result in the increase in income tax paid by the common man. Bureaucracy is integrated with most government agencies. The same cannot be neglected in the Public health care system.

Public health care issues have become a major concern for governments across the globe. Public health care can affect the already sunken global economy adversely. At the time when the world economy is in a crisis, the added health costs have stalled the public health care reform. Governments have come to a conclusion that universal public health care sector requires additional revenues which in such a time of economic crisis cannot be compensated with a raise in taxes, nor budgets of other sectors such as education or military can be used to fund the public health care.

However, a public health care option can result in construction of clinical centres in various cities where government medical facilities are not available. Thus this can result in newer public health care jobs in medical fields such as dentistry, nutrition, health education, environmental sciences, nursing, medicine, health services and administration.

As the debate between public health care vs private health care goes on, it will be interesting to see whether universal public health care makes a significant mark in countries mostly run and controlled by the private health care sector.