Health Care

This blog will be dedicated to the topic of health care in relation to inequality and globalization. As a student looking into going into the medical field and maybe some day working overseas as well as in the United States, I am interested in my future career in light of globalization and inequality. Health care is a problem world wide as well and in the United States. From the information I have acquired in the past few years from watching the news I know that in the US many people who need health care are going without because they cannot afford insurance and certainly can not afford the medical bills they will be charged. These people are the elderly and the poor in our society. My globalization class talked about the “invisible poor” and how they are living in the worst part of cities and striving to live, some panhandling because they can make more money there than with an “acceptable” job. We discussed how in the world today our society is a consumer society and we strive to earn money to buy more things or the ideas that companies are presenting to us in their ads and that the poor today are “failed consumers.” I think that in much the same way the poor and elderly are “failed consumers” of the medical field. Hospitals are businesses and what they are selling could make lives better but because the poor and elderly can not afforded health care they do without. If these people choose to purchase medicines they need they could be spending money that they need for food or housing. Much is being discussed in the new today and for the past few years about healthcare and the state it is in, in the United States, in fact this is not new as an article from the Washington Post in 2006 demonstrates( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/12/AR2006121201436.html). Through my blogging on this topic I would like to learn more about the health care in the United States and how it relates in the inequality and globalization in relation to the country where I live and also in the state of Washington. I am interested in the relationship of inequality in health care in relation to life expectance as was presented in this blog http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/10/20/inequalities-in-health-care/. I would also like to find out what the state of health care is like in other countries including first and third world countries. How is health care related to globalization in these areas? I would like to come out of this with a clearer picture of the career path I have chosen outside of the world of science. This may even help me be better at what ever job I choose.