Government’s Role in Healthcare, Essay Example

In the contemporary world, the ideal of equality and protection of human rights becomes more legally protected than ever in the human history. One of the aspects of human rights and the principle of equality is the equal access to benefits of welfare and health care. In this regard, one of the primary roles of government is to influence the national healthcare system via means of policies in order to provide safeguard inclusion of all individuals into that system and improvement of health of the population (Riegelman and Kirkwood, 2014).

The government’s role to develop policies is conditioned by the necessity of providing access of all social groups to the benefits of healthcare and provision of the basic medical support to all of the population (Leatt and Mapa, 2003). In this regard, the government issues various standards and policies’ schemes in order provide services where market rules are incapable of doing so. In other words, while the private sector treats healthcare as commodity, the government is the one to treat healthcare system as means of securing human right for medical treatment and access to healthcare benefits (Riegelman and Kirkwood, 2014). The role of government is to balance the process of commodification and to ensure that the most vulnerable groups of society receive access to healthcare.

Another role of government in developing healthcare policies is to ensure universal protection of all population under the conditions of unexpected and extreme circumstances (Riegelman and Kirkwood, 2014). Any private entity would not be able to take responsibility for the national scale of unpredicted disasters related to healthcare, while government can and is obliged to do so. For instance, in the case of pandemics and other health related disasters of the global scale, government is the one who can prepare the national healthcare system for the required actions and also take responsibility for the state of emergency and quarantine status of certain areas (Leatt and Mapa, 2003). The government is responsible for the entire country while the private sector only for a few areas.

References

Leatt, P. and Mapa J. (2003). Government Relations in the Health Care Industry. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

Riegelman, R. and Kirkwood, B. (2014). Public Health 101. Burlington, MA: Jones & Barlett Learning.