Research Blog

America's Bitter Pill: Money, politics, backroom deals, and the fight to fix our broken healthcare system. This book touches on a point I learned about in my political class last semester, it talks about the corruption in politics and in how politicians are in big industries back pockets that make it impossible to talk about the big topics such as healthcare, the environment and gun control. When companies "own" politicians there is no way anything big enough can ever get done that will actually change this country and the way things are done. Our founding fathers could have never imagined a world in which all of this exists let alone how corrupt it all is, we need to make a change today for tomorrow and that is what this book talks about.

An American Sickness: how healthcare became big business and how you can take it back by Elisabeth Rosenthal This read was significantly more interesting than the other one I read and let's be honest, I read the important chapters of the others because I was extremely over reading books 400 pages long about healthcare. This book talks about how in the country that is quickly unraveling due to corrupt politics, American medicine is the first thing to go. "In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. American healthcare was set up like a best buy, but that's not how healthcare works. They expect you to shop like you do at best buy, make the smart choice and take your time with research however they place you in an environment in which you are most likely unconscious or unable to make an educated decision. It's when your kid is sick or you...

This academic article was found on JSTOR which is a trusted site to find academic articles. This particular article talks about the beginning of the end for universal healthcare in Australia and all the broken promises the government made. Basically, there was a new conservative government that made a whole bunch of budget cuts to their standardized healthcare which affects a majority of people living in Australia. See, the public sector of healthcare in Australia is single-payer healthcare, that means everyone is provided a basic level of health insurance paid for by a single entity. Australia is unique though is the fact that they also have a private sector that doesn't take away from the public health system like in America, in fact, it just gives you an "upgrade" like nicer rooms at the hospital, better food and such. It is like paying a-la-carte for hospital stays. What this article is talking about though is if you affect/takeaway benefits of everyone's basic le...

How the Affordable Care Act will improve our terribly complex, blatantly unjust, outrageously expensive, grossly inefficient, error-prone system: The Book: If I am being completely honest, I check four books out at the library in one day thinking I have a couple months to read these, it will be all well and dandy and let me tell you they were so incredibly dry. Yes, this undoing was all on myself for choosing a topic with incredibly dry books. Anyways, moving past that this book had some interesting points to it which perhaps didn't help me learn more about universal and single-payer healthcare and why it did or didn't work in America, instead, it did teach me about how it failed. This is the synopsis of the book (you really learn all you need from this, don't bother giving it a read) In March 2010, the affordable care act was signed into law. it was the most extensive reform of Americas health care system since at least the creation of Medicare in 1965, and maybe ever....

Michelle Zierk ENGL 2030 July 7, 2019 Final Project Proposal National Healthcare My proposed topic for the final project of this semester is national healthcare. While this is a broad topic at such, I am curious to learn more about why it is either successful or not in certain countries. I am interested in this particular topic for multiple reasons. Those reasons being, I have multiple chronic illnesses that in turn mean I am very involved in the healthcare and insurance industry as well as, our current president recently revoked ObamaCare which was our national healthcare system. Due to my illnesses and almost being 26, my interest in healthcare overall has spiked and I am shocked at the affordability or lack thereof in this country. National healthcare spiked my interest not only for the reasons above but also because I knew very little about it. What I did know was, it is a hot button topic in our country that divides us as much as gun control and is one...

Why is America so opposed to universal health care? "...The rest of the developed world has largely accepted the government’s role in ensuring affordable health care, the US remains stuck in an endless debate full of misinformation perpetuated by rich interest groups." (Gay, 1) This article gets to the point, it starts off with the aforementioned quote addressing the fact that America is behind the rest of the world. It goes on to talk about how even Hong Kong, which is notably a hands-off government even provides universal healthcare for its' people. "How is it that such an advanced society is so averse to an idea that’s elemental in most of the developed world? The answer has to do with the individualist and anti-intellectual political culture that  Donald Trump has ridden into the White House, and with the political power of a health care industry heavily armed to protect its own interests. The US Republican-controlled House of Representatives this month pushed t...

Reddit- This seems like an interesting website to pop up when researching universal or single-payer healthcare however it piqued my interest. What I found was a subreddit all about universal healthcare and why Americans "hate" it. It was originally posted as a question from a guy from New Zeland just trying to gain some more insight into why America was so against it. Interesting enough, I found that this was a wonderful place to gain insight into many different peoples' opinions in one place. More than a few "Redditors" chimed in with their perspective which in-turn taught me a lot about how not everyone is well educated on the topic and many people don't see how there is a beneficial aspect to raising their taxes more. I thought one man's opinion to be valid after all of the previous research I have done, "First of all, taxes would definitely go up significantly in order to compensate for it and a lot of American's are advocating for fewer t...

For the next form of research, I decided to look for videos that talked about single-payer healthcare and I found one by VOX on Youtube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNla9nyRMmQ It talks the viewer through what is incredibly wrong with the current healthcare system America has. In this current day scenario, different insurances talk to the healthcare providers such as the hospitals itself and bargain prices for how much they will pay and that is then transferred to the customer. In America there is a sliding scale as per se for healthcare; you can go to the er with multiple different insurances (from public like medicare to private like Kaiser) and pay a varying amount of money or you could show up with no healthcare and pay the entire full price. This current system takes advantage of the fact that most people don't know enough about health procedures themselves to "do it themselves". They also take advantage of the fact that when people come in for help they are o...

The article I found through the Auraria Library database is called: Redefining Global Health-care delivery. When trying to find an article that was relevant to my topic, health-care on a large scale, I decided to research via key-words. I typed in health care and after scrolling through the results I found that this article was the one most relevant to my topic. The article itself talks about, "Initiatives to address the unmet needs of those facing both poverty and serious illness have expanded significantly over the past decade. But many of them are designed in an ad-hoc manner to address one health problem among many; they are too rarely assessed; best practices spread slowly." (Kim, Farmer, Porter, 1060) The article goes on to talk about ways to spread disease awareness, preventions, and cures for mass diseases such as HIV/AIDS. The article changed my perspective on my topic because it reminded me that there are diseases that the USA has cured and has cures for that th...

There are three different options for field survey that we learned about this week, interview, observation, and survey. When considering what would be best for my particular topic you must first know what each specifically targets. Interviews are in most cases a one on one based whereas, observation and survey would be group-based. This sets interviews apart from the group, they are a tunnel into someone's heart, history, and opinion, aka. brain. Interviews target specific demographics because you target who exactly you are asking questions to. Observation is a much more relaxed way of gathering research. The pressure of the interview and asking the correct questions is off, instead, you sit back and watch what people are doing, how they interact with your subject and then you can gather your results from there. This would perhaps be good if you were researching something that was visible such as exercise and diet, however, I am researching something that is not physical and theref...

Throughout my beginning steps of research, I have learned how important what you search can be. This came particularly true the other day at my local library, I was trying to find books relevant to my topic of nationally funded healthcare and wouldn't you believe, there aren't a lot of books out there called that. In my hunt, I used boolean search terms to find books that could somehow be related. For example, I searched terms such as; Healthcare AND politics because I have found they go together when considering my subject and healthcare OR affordable care act. As for more specific searches, I have looked up, healthcare, affordable care act, politics in healthcare, us healthcare, national healthcare systems, prescriptions, and so on. The search for relevant words seems endless and I think anything related to healthcare can pull up something interesting that gives a unique spin on my research thus far.

For this assignment we were meant to take a look at our local universities online database of articles and find one relevant to our subject. I found one called, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. While one might look at the title and think it could be a bit dry, it was in fact rather interesting. See, it opened up a new lense for myself when considering why national healthcare is either a good or bad thing for the country and why it fails and succeeds in different parts of the world. I think when you consider national healthcare you, or at least I did, look at it at in ways of money. What pressure it would put on the low, middle, and high classes of our society and how much of a dent it would make in people's wallets comapred to the difference it would make. Of course I considered how a nationally funded system of health care could help people who are poor or homeless however, I had never considered how it might (and does already) affect di...

My train of research: ->National Healthcare on Wikipedia ->National Health Service Wikipedia ->National Health Insurance Corporation Wikipedia ->National Insurance Act 1911 ->The Obama Plan https://web.archive.org/web/20100105142032/http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/ ->Healthcare for America NOW! http://healthcareforamericanow.org/ ->Doctors Debate Universal Health Care: Pros and Cons From the Experts http://thesurvivaldoctor.com/2013/02/14/doctors-debate-universal-health-care-pros-and-cons-from-the-experts/ ->One hundred and eighteen years of the German health insurance system: are there any lessons for middle- and low-income countries? http://www.ministerial-leadership.org/sites/default/files/resources_and_tools/10%20german%20health%20insu.pdf ->Social health insurance: Key factors affecting the transition towards universal coverage https://www.who.int/health_financing/documents/shi_key_factors.pdf ->Health Po...

What do you believe is the biggest problem facing…             …this country? I believe the biggest problems facing our country are political divide, global warming, national healthcare/unaffordable healthcare.              …your local community? I believe the things that affect the country also affect our local community however overpopulation, homeless populations, lack of affordable housing are also big issues that need discussion.             …people your age? The big things that affect people my age are affordable housing, unaffordable healthcare, higher education expenses, and global warming.            …the next generation? Things that will affect the next generation are global warming, overpopulation, war and peace, debt, etc.            ...

Welcome! This blog is all about research and is a project of mine for school. Although this is not a typical blog filled with recipes or crafts it will hopefully be a platform in which we can learn together.  You probably want to know a little about me at this point, well, I am studying graphic design at UCDenver and absolutely love it. A few years ago I was living in Steamboat Springs, CO. taking some time off of life and school, working minimum wage jobs and at a bank. Although some would say this is the life (living in a ski town and in the mountains), I would agree to disagree, I have big dreams for my life and living that life was helping accomplish none of them. What are those big dreams you ask? Well, I hope to have a family one day and live abroad, traveling all over, exploring the world and different cultures. Opening not only my eyes to the world but my families as well. I also hope to be successful in my design career and have hobbies that help expand my comfort zone...