US Healthcare System

Essay

Effective education in all professions is essential to ensuring that the graduates produced are competent and qualified to use their knowledge and skills to provide solutions to societal problems. The education sector has also implemented strategies and policies that also ensure the graduates produced are adequate to fill up the gaps in some of the professions. An example is the education of healthcare professionals in which most of the schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry and other professions receive federal and state funds to subsidize the heavy fees requirements for students in these institutions. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma as a majority of the healthcare graduates when they graduate and become health practitioners feel no obligation to the society that supported their education.

Questions arise on whether or not the healthcare professionals who received state or federal funding in their education have an ethical responsibility to repay the taxpayers through meeting the needs of the medically underserved. In my opinion, these healthcare professionals should meet the needs of the medically underserved because if it were not for the public funding in education, they probably wouldn’t be in that position. This act by medical practitioners’ shows gratitude and appreciation for the help received in their studies. Besides, the caring of the poor is a responsibility of healthcare practitioners that they should embrace. According to the American Medical Association, which is an organization that offers scholarships to medical students, the responsibilities of a physician include having an obligation to share in offering quality care to the indigent (Huang, 2011). All the physicians should undertake their responsibilities to ensure that the needs of the poor in the society are met and that the caring of this group of people should become a routine part of their overall service. Therefore, all the students pursuing courses in this field should develop a keen interest in caring for the underserved and should take advantage of the opportunities provided in medical institutions to learn to care for them. Also, the number of these medically underserved people in the society is increasing significantly, yet there are no proper measures to address their ethical needs.

In 2009, the US Census Bureau estimated that about 50.7 million Americans did not have health insurance, therefore less likely to seek disease preventive measures or screening and also have poorer outcomes for treatment of illnesses, especially chronic diseases. Today, the underserved in the society are cared by some physicians by practicing full-time in public health systems as well as community health centers.

Policies should also be enacted in this field to ensure that healthcare students who receive grants and scholarships in school commit to caring for the underserved. An example of such a policy is offering conditional scholarships in which the medical students commit to helping the underserved people in the community. Studies have shown that the conditional scholarships, which are grants for medical education on condition that a medical student makes a pre-commitment to serve an underserved area for a number of years after graduation, are effective in ensuring adequate supply of physicians to the medically underserved regions and also withstand a host of ethical issues (Eyal & Bärnighausen, 2012). Therefore, it is not unethical for healthcare providers who received grants and scholarships from the government to repay the goodwill of the taxpayers by meeting the needs of the medically underserved in the society.

References

Eyal, N., & Bärnighausen, T. (2012). Precommitting to serve the underserved. The American Journal of Bioethics, 12(5), 23-34. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2012.665134

Huang, W. Y. (2011). Learning to Care for the Underserved—Making the Most of Opportunities in Medical School. Virtual Mentor, 13(8), 544.

Carolyn Morgan is the author of this paper. A senior editor at Melda Research in Research Paper Writing Service. if you need a similar paper you can place your order for a custom research paper from A+ Affordable Paper Writing Service.

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