Since the beginning of its existence, health care and its availability has been a centerpiece for debate. Health care has long been considered to be a human right, yet in the world we live in today, health care is lived out as a privilege. As hard as the government is trying to make health care coverage accessible to everyone, reality is that over four million people living in the United States alone do not have health care coverage at all. Not only does the availability or lack thereof, of health care come into debate, but so does the coverage that should be included in each health care package. One issue that has a stirred such controversy is whether or not a medical procedure is in its experimental stages.
Most health insurance companies do not cover a medical procedure if the procedure is considered to be in its developmental stages. However, in retrospect, a definition is always controversial, especially if it is not concrete. There is no way to unequivocally define when a medical procedure is experimental. There should not be a tag labeled to specifically weed out procedures that are not one hundred percent efficient and safe. There is no medical procedure that has a one hundred percent success rate. There will always be risk of failure no matter how many times the procedure was performed. The same risk applies to a relatively new medical discovery. There are no differences that should separate the two. Even the same procedure on different patients is subject to various variables and uncertainties much like an entirely new procedure. If the “experimental” procedure is worth the time and effort to test a patient, then it should be permissible by health coverages.
This is not to say that health coverages have the obligation of paying for the entire operation. However, the coverages should alleviate some of the financial burden by enforcing a limit on how much they are willing to pay. The government should create a universal set of guidelines for health care coverage to reduce the amount of controversy that pollutes the country. There is too much room for debate due to the lack of a unifying set of laws. Companies are able to exploit patients through ambiguous wording and unethical actions.
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