Medicare: Why is it being challenged and how should we respond?

Medicare: How and why is it being challenged and how should we respond?
Name
Institution
Medicare: How and why is it being challenged and how should we respond?
Proposal
Canadian Medicare has ensured that patients receive treatment based on the need and urgency of the condition rather than patients ability to pay. As such, the health system has ensured that people have equal and effective access to healthcare services. However, Medicare is facing several challenges, one of them being the long wait time. Busby, Muthukumaran, and Jacobs (2018) indicate that wait times in the Canadian healthcare system are well below the average, internationally, because there are long wait times in almost every stage of healthcare delivery. This has resulted in a low score when it comes to performance, especially when gauged against our counterparts in the United States. However, more importantly, long waits pose a problem to all patients, especially those in need of acute care, nationally. Long waits are being experienced from the emergency rooms to getting appointments with specialists (Busby, Muthukumaran, & Jacobs, 2018), resulting in a delay from the point a patient gets a referral to the point where they receive treatment. In extreme cases, such a delay can put the health of the patient in jeopardy, which will be in contrary to what the system is meant to do: save patients by providing efficient and effective care. This clearly indicates that there is a problem with Medicare and as such, it is important to address the problem.
To solve the issue, I propose an approach in which patients are legally allowed to use private payment plans for any medical issue. Past proposals such as increasing federal government funding have not been successful because of issues of accountability. (Flood, Marchildon, &Paech, 2018) Indicate that the provinces believe that long wait times are due to lack of enough funding from the federal government, yet the federal government claim that there are enough funds which are misappropriated by the provinces. Thus, it is important that the problem is approached from a policy change perspective.
Annotated Bibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY \l 1033
MacKinnon, J. (2017). Wait Times in Canada. Healthcare Management Forum, 30(4), 190-192. doi:10.1177/0840470417700162
This article examines long waits in the Canadian Medicare and highlights some of the measures that the government has adopted in addressing the issue of long wait times in elective surgery. The article further highlights the possible causes of the long wait time in the Canadian Medicare, indicating that having only one acceptable payment for healthcare services has resulted in rationing, which in turn causes a shortage in the supply side. As such, the demand for health services becomes higher than the supply of the services, creating a long ...