Health Care Professions: Issues and Questions I

Health Care Professions: Issues and Questions

I believe that health care is indeed a right for all people. Just as personal and public safety is a right that we all believe in, ascribe to, and pay to uphold, so we should also protect the right to be healthy. It is the nation's job to help create an existence for its citizens that is free from disease and other forms of harm. The government does this in other concrete ways for its people, such as by providing definitive means of protection through a police force and through legislation to protect public and personal safety. Thus the health and wellness safety of its people needs to be treated as equally important. Those who oppose a pervasive and comprehensive healthcare system for all (and with it, the taxes that come to all in order to afford such a system) often argue that sick people, diabetics, smokers with lung cancer, and others, don't have a right to their money. However, "As two commentators recently put it, 'equality of opportunity is not a natural state; it is a social achievement, for which government shares some responsibility. The proper reaction to egalitarianism is not indifference. It is the promotion of a fluid society in which aspiration is honored and rewarded.' A child with Down Syndrome may not have the right to my money. But we are a better community, and a better country, if we give it to him anyway" (Roy, 2013). The fundamental answer is that we have the responsibility to pay for the costs of public health; even if we're not always reaping the benefits that public health can provide, and even if we're paying for the healthcare of others via our own taxes, we're a better collective society for such actions.

b.The nursing shortage is indeed global, and not just localized to the U.S. In order to alleviate their own nursing shortage, higher income countries (such as the U.S.) will need to be as aggressive as possible. For many nations this will mean recruiting from low/middle income countries. However, this doesn't mean that those countries will necessarily be impacted in a negative or drastic manner. Instead of recruiting from the pool of already working nurses, the nations in question simply need to recruit from the pool of unemployed young women and men. This will be a means of giving these young women and men gainful employment and education. Of course, this alternative is more expensive and time-consuming, but it will have more beneficial results for all involved. In this case, these wealthy nations don't have to struggle to find nursing candidates from western nations where people are reluctant to go into the field. As one journalist explained, "Thousands of nurses and midwives are still being poached from the world's poorest countries to work in the UK in spite of government attempts to restrict recruitment by private agencies, the Guardian can reveal… The impact of losing trained medical staff can be huge for poor countries that have high burdens of disease and chronically understaffed hospitals" (Boseley, 2005). This is not what is being proposed. In this case, Western nations are just interested in taking the actual individuals who need work and providing them with work which happens to be in the medical field. Obviously, negative effects will be experienced by all if nurses are poached from needy countries.