Month: November 2019

Health care in the united states is a very important topic, one that is in headlines all the time. Everyone talks about the high cost, the lack of accessibility and poor quality. Trying to figure out how to draft health care coverage is a very difficult task. I think the easiest answer would be to say to research and figure out what works for other countries and implement them in our country. Health care in the United States is not at the top of the best in the world, it is actually very low although we are the country that spends the most money on health care.

For example, countries like France and Canada have free health care, they don’t pay at all for any visits or having health coverage, they just go to get care without having to worry about paying. This is an idea that has been trying to make its way into the United States but it never makes it through because some people disagree that it would benefit them or have other issues with it.

I think it is extremely difficult to say who can and cannot be covered, I would say that for me everyone would be covered but that’s a very hard point to reach, so I would have to say the ones that are in need of care the most. I also think that things that I would include in this coverage are those that are either life and death, or things that could lead to that. Also cover medicine, surgeries, care or whatever else that affects a person in their daily lives. The only thing I wouldn’t cover would be things that aren’t actually needed but are being wanted by the patient because they aren’t as necessary. Funding it is another difficult thing to figure out, but I would have to say through taxes like other countries do, if it greatly would benefit us, I think this way would be the best. In a documentary I saw called Sicko, they interviewed a lady about how high taxes affected her in her daily life, she said it didn’t at all, she didn’t have to worry about her health and health care cost, her money was going to the house she lived in, and groceries and didn’t really struggle in her everyday life because of taxes but rather was a relief to not worry about her care.

I think obviously the way that we have been going on about health care in the U.S. is not the best way, we need to change the way it is set up to make sure everyone is being care of properly.  

http://watchdocumentaries.com/sicko/

Artificial Intelligence or AI is a popular and very talked about topic during this time, it will greatly impact health care and the way we get care. Unlike humans AI detects much more than humans can as well as being correct. Although very useful, there could be some problems with using Al. For instance, it could lead to a doctor’s dependency on AI, without it they couldn’t do much or give good diagnosis and patients can be hurt by this. Another issue could be that there could be an issue with AI as in it glitching or something of that sort, I’m not sure if it could accidentally give someone the wrong prognosis or something along those lines but if possible, that could be potentially dangerous. I think though like Bernard Marr said in the clip, AI needs to be used alongside doctors, as a team and working together trying to figure out what is best for the patient.

AI couldn’t see race, gender, class or ability and just focus on the data that is being given, there would be no bias as there is with doctors. No woman would die because of a heart attack because doctors just think women are having anxiety. Minorities wouldn’t be ignored when they go to the doctors with problems because AI could see there is an issue without noticing their race. AI could provide positive health outcomes for those that as of now might be sometimes ignored by some providers.

I believe we should use AI in health care, the positive outcomes I feel like outweigh the negative. Better care can be provided to everyone by using artificial intelligence. I read a book recently called, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande, in one of the chapters, he describes a study that was done in Sweden on artificial intelligence. The study was on EKG reading heart attacks, they were trying to figure out if a human or machine was better at figuring out if the person had a heart attack. The cardiologist that this was tested on had read ten thousand EKGs a year, they gathered two thousand two hundred and forty EKGs, half of them, eleven hundred and twenty showed heart attacks. When tested the result were that the cardiologist picked up six hundred and twenty, while the computer picked up seven hundred and thirty-eight, the machine beat the man by 20 percent. These result show how AI beats men in being able to pick up on stuff doctors might miss, although not perfect, it increases the percentage of people being treated correctly according to what their test result showed.

Gawande, Atul. Complications: a Surgeons Notes on an Imperfect Science. Picador, 2003.