Guiding You through Jobs in Nursing

Welcome back if you're a returning visitor and just plain welcome, if you're new! As you know if you've been here before, this is where I give advice to job seekers. Today, I am featuring an article about the US healthcare system, designed to give those looking for jobs in nursing a high-altitude view of the industry as a whole. Let's get started!

The United States is the only industrialized, wealthy nation without a national healthcare system. About 16% of US citizens do not have health insurance. However, Federal law mandates that a person cannot be turned down for emergency medical services because of an inability to pay for them.

Medicine is practiced in a variety of facilities throughout the United States. Obviously, there are for-profit hospitals, operated by private corporations, and there are also nonprofit hospitals, which are usually operated by the government or nonprofit or religions organizations. Hospitals provide a small amount of outpatient care in emergency rooms and specialty clinics but are run primarily to provide inpatient care.

A small segment of the population (about 9%) chooses to purchase individual health care insurance. The government covers about 80 million Americans, but in the year 2006, approximately 47 million people did not have health insurance at all. 37% of the uninsured live in homes that have annual incomes of over $50,000.

Managed Care organizations include HMOs (Health Maintenance Organizations) and PPOs (Preferred Provider Organizations. A PPO general has a higher cost than an HMO, but a PPO allows the patient to choose where they receive their care, while with an HMO they are constrained to "in-network" providers. The PPO has been the dominant of the two, over the past decade, and it is common today for a physician or hospital to have contracts with a dozen or more health plans, each with different referral networks, contracts with different diagnostic facilities, and different practice guidelines.,

There are many individuals that are not covered by private insurance, but are covered by government programs such as Medicaid (which provides care to the poor), Medicare (which provides care for the elderly and disabled), or the Veterans Administration (which provides care to veterans, their families and survivors). In 2006, Medicaid provided coverage for 38 million Americans while Medicare did the same for about 40 million. Another 11 million people are eligible for coverage but are not enrolled in any kind of government program.

The number of physicians accepting Medicaid has decreased over the past decade due to high administrative costs and low levels of reimbursement. Another program, the State Children's Health Insurance Program was created in 1997 to provide coverage for children in families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid yet can't afford to buy health insurance- however, this program is already losing funding in may states.

Thanks for taking the time to read this; I hope it was as illuminating for you to read as it was for me to write! Keep this information in mind as you go forward in your hunt for jobs in nursing and you will be well served in the future.