Archive for the ‘Health Care’ Category
New Direction for Health Care Reform
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became the law of the land in 2010, but debate over its existence and implementation will rage on in the New Year. The law’s serious policy flaws are already impacting health insurance and costs, but these are part of a deeper and broader issue: the proper role for the federal government in Americans’ health care. The public’s stance on this issue has been anything but settled in the wake of the new law’s passage. Easy To Insure ME has the answers
As ramifications of Obamacare continue to play out, it becomes clearer that the changes made are the wrong ones. The new law cuts 5 billion from Medicare, but uses the savings to fund a new health entitlement, rather than deal with the financial insolvency that Medicare faces. “Bending the cost curve” was one of Obamacare’s original goals, but Medicare’s actuary reports that while the the new law indeed bends the curve, it is in the wrong direction: up, not down.
Furthermore, countless employers have said Obamacare accelerated increases in their health insurance premiums, prompting them to consider dropping coverage or pass more of the cost onto employees and their families. Mandates and new regulations are likely to further inhibit businesses’ ability to offer health insurance to employees, and also threaten to negatively affect the economy at large. Finally, when the law comes fully online and the true costs are accounted for, Obamacare is expected to significantly increase the nation’s deficit spending.
But the debate extends beyond these policy errors and into the realm of the federal government’s rightful role in health care. Obamacare significantly increases Washington’s influence over every aspect of the U.S. health care system—not just in the insurance market, but right down to the patient’s bedside. Medicare beneficiaries will be especially affected by the creation of new bureaucratic entities and top-down, cost-containing mechanisms included in the law.
Meanwhile, Americans continue to oppose parts or all of the new health reform law. Pollsters like Rasmussen show that Americans’ support for repealing Obamacare has ranged from 50 percent to 63 percent since the law’s passage. In November, American voters chose to send a wave of new lawmakers to Congress, many of whom campaigned in support of repealing the law. The provisions in Obamacare are not consistent with what Americans want, strengthening the case for repeal and a new direction for health care reform.
So what’s the alternative? Reform should transform the health care system to strengthen individuals’ control over their health care spending and decision-making. Patients, including those covered by Medicare and Medicaid, should have the opportunity to choose health care plans in the private insurance market that best suit their needs.
Market-based reforms would foster greater competition among insurers and more choices for consumers, enabling them to seek out the best value for their dollar. This bottom-up approach to reducing health care costs would maintain the quality of care available in the United States. It would put doctors and patients, not Washington bureaucrats, in charge of decisions relating to individuals’ care.
As the conversation continues, plans that embody these principles are gaining greater traction. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” would drastically change Medicare, Medicaid, and the health care system at large, to put patients in the driver’s seat. Ryan and Alice Rivlin, both members of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, together offered a similar plan for Medicare and Medicaid that would replace the highly centralized, bureaucratic system with a defined-contribution program, offering beneficiaries greater autonomy.
In 2011, repeal must remain a priority for the new Congress, not only to undo the disastrous consequences of Obamacare, but as the first step to reform that will fix the health care system in ways that empower patients, not bureaucrats.
Why Health Care Reform Could Leave Us All Worse Off
The health care reform bills being debated in Congress threaten to shut out millions of immigrants. But Congress’ exclusionary policies toward immigrants will not simply leave immigrants worse off. They will inevitably jeopardize the nation’s economy and the health of all of us.
President Obama has prioritized health care reform to ensure that millions of Americans have a fair, affordable and efficient health care system. For immigrants, this vision is far from a reality. First, the current health care reform bill treats legal immigrants unfairly. Individuals who have waited years to come to the United States will be required to wait years in order to obtain affordable health care.
Immigrants are generally younger and healthier than the U.S. population at large. However, no one is immune to falling ill or having an accident. The current health care bill would require recently arrived, legal immigrants to wait five years to obtain the only option for affordable health care coverage, Medicaid. While low-income citizens will have access to Medicaid, the most vulnerable among us will continue to wait for affordable health care despite the fact that they pay taxes for the very programs from which they are excluded. There is no sound reason for Congress to discriminate against these individuals and prevent them from receiving basic medical care.
Congress and the White House also took an unprecedented step to prohibit individuals from buying – with their own hard-earned money – an American good that could help their families. The Senate version of the health care bill forbids undocumented immigrants from purchasing private insurance at full cost in the newly created insurance marketplaces. As a result, undocumented immigrants as well as their family members, who are often U.S. citizens or legal immigrants, will likely remain uninsured and will be forced to seek care in the emergency room.
The costs of providing health care for undocumented immigrants will not disappear after passing health care reform. It is unlikely that millions of immigrants, whose contributions keep up our standard of living and our economy functioning, will be deported. Instead, the cost of care will become the financial responsibility of the patient, the provider, the local and state governments, and every single taxpayer. Moreover, in order to exclude a few, there will be additional forms, documents, and bureaucrats that the rest of us will be subjected to. Buying the mandated health insurance could feel like a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Taxpayers will have to pay millions for this additional red tape and delay, all to keep a few people from buying health insurance with their own money.
Providers, employers, consumers, religious leaders, and state and local governments recognize that these policies are short-sighted and will cost all of us more in the long-run. Policies that attempt to exclude and ostracize immigrants also disproportionately harm all communities of color and immigrant-rich states like California and New York, further widening existing inequities in our nation. Yet because immigrants live in all 50 states, the intended and unintended consequences and costs of these restrictions will be far-reaching.
Ending discriminatory and exclusionary policies in this final round of negotiations is not only a matter of fundamental fairness and sound economics. It is required in order to not leave all of us worse off. Congress has a short window of opportunity to remove the restrictions on legal and undocumented immigrants in the health care reform bill. Doing so will not jeopardize the passage of the bill. Failing to doing so, however, will leave all of us, immigrant or not, worse off and wondering what happened to the promise of health care reform.
Proposed Rate Hikes to Health Care Reform
Health insurers across the country are planning to raise premiums for some of their customers in the coming weeks, the Wall Street Journal reports, and they are in part blaming President Obama’s health care reform package for the rate hikes.
On the surface, at least, the news boosts Republicans’ arguments against the Democrats’ reforms ahead of this year’s midterm elections. But the White House and other supporters of the reform package say they are skeptical of the health insurance companies’ rationale.
Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked regulators to approve premium increases of between one percent and nine percent to pay for the bill’s early benefits, the Journal reports. The rate increases would largely apply to individual plans (9 percent of Americans have individual plans) and those offered for small businesses (about 20 percent of Americans get coverage from small employers).
The early benefits cited by insurers for the rate increase include allowing children up to 26 years old to stay on their parents’ health care plans, eliminating co-payments for preventive care and prohibiting insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. These benefits apply to all plans, not just individual and small business policies.
The insurers are also reportedly asking for further rate increases they are not tying to the health care overhaul that they say are needed to cover rising medical costs. Some customers could see their premiums increase by more than 20 percent.
Nancy-Ann DeParle, the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, told the Journal that insurers were using the new health reforms as an excuse to raise rates.
“I would have real deep concerns that the kinds of rate increases that you’re quoting… are justified,” she said. “We believe consumers will see through this.”
Health Care for America Now, a coalition group in support of the health care overhaul, slammed the insurance industry and pointed to insurers’ history as evidence that its latest claims were misleading. For instance, WellPoint’s Anthem subsidiary had to reduce its proposed rate hike in California earlier this year after it tried to justify increases as high as 39 percent with erroneous numbers.
“The health insurance industry is doing the same thing it has always done, raising premiums to achieve excessive profits and outrageous salaries for their CEOs,” HCAN executive director Ethan Rome said in a statement.
The complaints haven’t stopped Republicans from jumping on the opportunity to criticize the Democrats’ policies. Senate Republicans are highlighting the Journal’s report while pointing to past comments from Mr. Obama and other Democrats, who promised that premiums would not increase as a result of the reforms.
In Kentucky, Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul slammed health care reforms in his first general election ad.
The health care overhaul has proven to be a harder sell to the American people than Democrats anticipated, prompting at least a handful of Democrats up for re-election to campaign on their vote against the reforms. Moderate Democrat Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.), for instance, says in an ad that she voted against the bill because “it wasn’t right for South Dakota.”
Health Care Reform Weekly Easytoinsureme Health Insurance Quotes
The election of Republican Scott Brown as the new senator from Massachusetts has derailed the Congressional health care reform train, less because Brown denies Democrats the 60th filibuster-proof vote, though that is certainly a major result, and more because it collapsed the Democratic political house of cards by highlighting the power of independent voters and the frustrated anti-incumbent mood of the electorate. Whether Democrats can regroup from this wake-up call will consume their leadership from now until the November off-year elections. How Democrats handle, and how Republicans respond to, health care reform in the short term and other key priorities – such as jobs, the economy, energy and security – over the rest of the session will underscore all Congressional decisions from now until the first Tuesday in November. In short, the 2010 elections started in earnest with Brown’s victory.
Once Democrats get past the shock of losing Kennedy’s seat, they will have to grapple with health care reform, one way or the other. The early favorites, including passing the Senate bill “as is” in the House, have been dropped for now as Democrats recognize the political cost of ramming through something unpopular propelled by political muscle only. Passing a smaller, less invasive and mostly Democratic bill has only a slightly better chance, as Republicans are not too likely to “crossover” quite yet. There is a growing interest in using reconciliation (the 51-vote tactic) down the road to pass a Democratic-only bill, once the House and Senate Democratic leadership can agree to a single bill. And, there is the outside chance that Democrats will see the Massachusetts election as an imperative to craft a bipartisan bill with Republicans that can secure 70-plus votes in the Senate. Wednesday’s State of the Union speech, followed by the party issues retreats later in the week, will go a long way toward determining which path will be pursued.
Health Care Cuts Draw Criticism
A proposal by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to cut 300,000 people from the health care plan for the poor will likely “increase the misery index,” a Prescott doctor said.
Dr. Joseph Goldberger, chief medical officer for the Yavapai Regional Medical Center and a rheumatologist with a private practice, said about 15 to 20 percent of the patients he sees at his rheumatology consulting practice are insured by the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the Arizona equivalent of Medicaid. Already, AHCCCS fees to doctors have been frozen, he said.
“The untold story is patients with or without insurance continue to get the care,” Goldberger said. “They get the most expensive care of all: ER care. Everybody else ends up paying for that through higher premiums. It has a significant impact.”Many of his arthritis patients need “very expensive” medications and “without insurance, they can’t afford them at all. The bigger problem is the access to medications.”
While that may not be life threatening in all situations, it certainly increases pain levels for arthritis patients.
In some situations, such as with a lupus patient who has kidney disease and can’t get access to chemotherapy, it could be life threatening, he said.
While Goldberger understands that the state is having budget problems and that education and health care are candidates for cost cuts, there are consequences, such as the loss of federal matching funds.
Health providers face a total cut of .7 million in state and federal money, according to the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association. The association protested the plan to transfer AHCCCS’s remaining graduate medical education money and nearly all private disproportionate hospital dollars to other uses. Arizona’s hospitals have seen 8 million in state funding cuts since 2008, trade group officials said.
Reduction in payments for training doctors – the graduate medical education money – is particularly egregious, said John Rivers, the hospital association president and CEO.
The state and federal government traditionally reimburse hospitals that train doctors who typically go through a residency in a specific area of medicine after they complete their medical training and internships, Rivers said. However, if the state doesn’t put up the money for that training, then the federal government won’t contribute its share, Rivers said.
“If we’re not training doctors, I don’t see how that is good for the people of Arizona,” Rivers said. “One of the important by-products of training doctors here is this is where they end up practicing. If they get training somewhere else, they stay there. It’s a horrible outcome for the people of Arizona.”
Already the state has only 219 doctors for every 100,000 people, while the national average is 293 physicians for every 100,000.
It’s also shortsighted economically to cut into hospital budgets as hospitals create jobs, he said. And the cuts will shrink the state’s economy by .8 million in federal Medicaid matching dollars that will now go to other states.
Hospitals in Arizona employ 73,300 people and contribute .5 billion to its gross economic product, according to an Arizona State University study.
While the Yavapai Regional Medical Center is not a teaching hospital and is not affected by the graduate medical aspect of the budget cuts, said Brian Hoefle, the chief financial officer, the lack of disproportionate care money from the state would result in a loss of several hundred thousand dollars.
“Gov. Jan Brewer is talking about eliminating some of those programs,” said Hoefle. “It would be up to the Legislature to decide on cuts to AHCCCS. Just because the state isn’t covering certain populations anymore doesn’t mean they won’t get sick and end up in our ER. If there’s no payment for them, it shifts the costs to the paying customers.”
The state will lose from the federal government for every dollar it cuts from AHCCCS, according to Hoefle.
“That’s very frustrating,” he said.
About 15 percent of patients who use YRMC are AHCCCS clients.
Meanwhile, the hospital has already seen large increases in bad debts and charity care over the past two years, Hoefle said. Charity care – wherein patients provide their financial information and are deemed unable to pay – has doubled from 2008 through 2009. While bad debtors – those who are unable or unwilling to pay but are not working with the hospital – have increased by 18 percent over the last two years.
“If the AHCCCS program is not going to pay hospitals, it’s going to fall back on hospitals to pay,” Hoefle said. People are “going to come to the hospital and we’re going to eat it. It ultimately affects commercial insurance. We raise our rates to insurance companies and those people who can pay will ultimately pay for the state’s lack of coverage. They’re talking about the hidden tax. Whoever is paying their hospital bills is paying for those who are not paying their hospital bills. Otherwise the hospital goes out of business.”
boomers will cripple health-care system
Four in every five Canadians believe that the demands placed on the health system by aging Baby Boomers will result in reduced access and lower quality care, a poll commissioned by the Canadian Medical Association reveals.
There are also widespread fears – by close to 75 per cent of respondents – that growing health costs will result in significant tax hikes and an inability of seniors to afford health care as they age.
At the same time, the survey shows strong support for user fees and having well-to-do Canadians pay more out-of-pocket to help attenuate the impact of caring for a growing population of seniors.
According to the poll, younger Canadians in particular (those born after 1966) are willing to adapt to the pressures on the medicare system by buying private health insurance to supplement publicly provided care, using their retirement savings to pay for health care and going into debt to pay the health costs of their parents and themselves.
“What we see in these poll results is a refreshing acknowledgment of reality,” Anne Doig, president of the CMA, said in an interview.
“Canadians are not giving up on medicare but they’re recognizing that medicare needs to be transformed to deal with current realities, demographic and otherwise,” she said.
The poll, which is being released Monday at the CMA general council meeting in Niagara Falls, Ont., dovetails nicely with a report released earlier this month entitled Health Care Transformation in Canada: Change that Works, Care that Lasts.
In that document, the CMA, the group representing Canada’s 72,000 physicians, argues that the current health system cannot meet future needs, in part because of the aging population. It calls for significant changes, including a universal prescription drug plan, a charter that enshrines the rights of patients, an independent body that can monitor whether health dollars are being spent efficiently, and monetary incentives for doctors and hospitals to treat more patients. The proposals are based on the premise that health care in Canada needs to be more patient-centred, with a greater focus on prevention and ensuring that geography, income level and age are not a barrier to getting quality, timely care.
Dr. Doig said the poll results show Canadians are pretty savvy about the challenges facing the health system.
Asked to rank who or what is most responsible for increased demand for health-care services, survey respondents blamed individual Canadians not taking responsibility for their own health (33 per cent), the large number of Baby Boomers reaching retirement age (30 per cent), higher demands and expectations by all Canadians (21 per cent) and new medical advances (16 per cent.)
Dr. Doig expressed concern that fingers would be pointed unfairly at Baby Boomers (those born between 1947 and 1966) for many of the woes of the health system.
“I worry that the blaming will happen,” she said. “We don’t want intergenerational tension, we want intergenerational fairness.”
Dr. Doig said she takes comfort in the fact that the younger Canadians who were polled “are being extremely realistic about the limits of medicare and so-called free health care.”
For example, the survey found that, among Canadians under the age of 46, 44 per cent said they were willing to buy private health insurance to supplement the publicly funded system; 37 per cent said they would also buy insurance to ensure their long-term care when they were elderly; and 29 per cent said they would save specifically to pay for health costs after retirement.
Ipsos Reid polled 3,483 Canadian adults online between June 8 and June 21. A sample of this size is considered accurate within 1.66 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
The survey, which has been conducted annually by the CMA for the past 10 years, also asks Canadians to rank the performance of governments in managing the health-care system as they would on a report card.
The marks awarded remained virtually unchanged over the past year: 41 per cent of respondents assigned either an A or B grade to the federal government performance (as 40 per cent did in 2009). Similarly, 41 per cent of Canadians awarded their provincial government either an A or B, consistent with the 2009 results (42 per cent).
Overall, 35 per cent of those polled said they thought health-care services would improve in the next year, while 51 per cent predicted they would get worse.
Health-care spending in Canada was an estimated 3-billion last year, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
Home health care services ? the need of elderly beings
Home health care services ? the need of elderly beings
Home health care can provide you with services in the comfort of your own home; these services are generally coordinated by a home health care agency. Some of these services include skilled nursing care, physical and occupational therapy, speech-language pathology services, and medical social services as advised and ordered by your physician. Additional home health care services may include personal care, some housekeeping, meal preparation, and general health management. Home health care can help facilitate staying in the home for senior citizens and disabled individuals.
Home health care agency staff can teach you and your caregivers to continue care such as wound care, therapy, and disease management. If you are leaving a hospital or skilled nursing facility, the discharge planner can help you to set up in-home care.
In order to be eligible for Medical coverage, the health services used must be both reasonable and necessary in the treatment of an illness or injury. A certified Home Health Care Agency may provide the following services:
Part-time or intermittent skilled nursing care by a registered or a licensed practical nurse
Personal and occupational therapy
Speech-language pathology services
If you are receiving skilled care or other therapy from the home health care agency, you may also receive part-time or intermittent home health aide services
Certain medical supplies that are part of your care, including wound dressings
Durable medical equipment such as a walker
Choosing a right home care agency always turns out to be a headache as there are so many referrals and recommendations that it becomes really difficult to choose the right one for your elders. There is no dearth of information pertaining to Home Health Care Agencies. One can refer to search engines on the internet or look up phone directories or contact information providers or get references from the family doctor. But the best way to choose the right agency is to ask people who have utilized home health care agencies as they have first-hand experience. Moreover, if they are recommended they are probably more reliable and good. In the event of not knowing anyone who has availed of home health care services it is best to interview caregivers from a few agencies and shortlist the best.
Besides taking into consideration word-of-mouth reputation and the services required, one should also consult the insurance company that is going to cover the expenses of the treatment and care. It is more convenient and advisable to contract with a Home Health Care Agency which is listed with your insurance company, provided the agency in question offers you what you are looking for. This avoids cumbersome paperwork and complications.
How to Pick the Best Online Health Care Degree
How to Pick the Best Online Health Care Degree
Health care is a booming industry that continuously needs skills workers and professional workforces to fulfill the job positions. If you are in the health care industry, the high demand in the industry can create a good opportunity for you to move your health care career to a high level, what you need is a good health care degree that can meet your career goal. Pursuing your health care degree online is a good option that allowed you to continue your current job while study online to earn a health care degree for a brighter future. There are many online health care degree programs available, so how you are going to pick the best online health degree program out of the list?
Before you pick the best online health care degree, you need to know what you want with the degree. Health Care industry covers a wide range of fields and each health care degree is designed to serve the need of each field. Alternative medicine, emergency management, psychology and life care planning are different careers in health care industry; there are many other fields in health care, which one is your target career? You need to make clear on your career direction before you decide which online health care to consider.
Once you have made up your mind of your preference health care career, your next step is to select an appropriate online health care degree that can meet your career goal. Although searching your preference online degree program is easy and convenient using internet, but time and efforts are needed to find the best online degree program. Besides the need to beware about the potential diploma mills, you should also aware that the same degree program offered by different accredited online universities may carry difference courses. The best thing to get a further understanding about these degrees is requesting all the detail information from the related online universities. The good thing is information requests are free of charge; hence you should fully utilize the free service to get all information you need about your preference online health care degree and compare them against your career goal.
The best online health care degree program should be offered by a reputable accredited online university. You want your degree carry the most value and well know by most employers in the health care industry because you will need it to help you in your health care career movement. In term of accreditation, you can always check your preference online universities with the accreditation database provided by CHEA.org. For reputation, you can check it against any complaints filed about your short listed universities at BBB.org.
The best online health care degree should gives you the necessary hand on practical and other on job training that are needed for you to familiar with the necessary skills to implement your knowledge and apply it to your job. If the selected online health care degree required these lab and practical works, find out from the online university about their medical partners that near your location that will allow you to perform your practical training.
In Summary
Selecting the best online health care degree out of the bests is not an easy task. The bottom line is your best online health care degree may not be the best in the market, but it is the best for you because it can fulfill your requirement to achieve your health care career goal.
Spiraling Health Care Costs
Spiraling Health Care Costs
Americans are deeply unhappy with the country’s health care programs and costs. And rightly so. As one author observed, “A recent survey showed that only 17 percent of respondents in the United States were content with their health-care system. Why the discontent? The superficial reasons are simple enough to describe: the system is hugely expensive, very bureaucratic, and extremely patchy. The expenses first: U.S. health care costs a third more, per person, than that of the closest rival, superrich Switzerland, and twice what many European countries spend. The United States government alone spends more per person than the combination of public and private expenditure in Britain, despite the fact that the British government provides free health care for all residents.”
The United States pays more for health care per capita than any other industrialized nation — and even then, Medicare is not a comprehensive, pay-for-everything national health program like those of many nations and United States per capita health care costs continue to escalate rapidly.
Here’s what you need to know about health care costs as you plan for retirement.
Americans age sixty-five and over spend four times more on health care on average than do Americans under the age of sixty-five. At the outset of this decade, the average per capita health-care outlay for a person under the age of sixty-file was about ,800. For people over the age of sixty-five, it was ,089. And for Americans ages eighty-five and older it was ,001. Clearly, health care outlays are likely to get substantially larger as you age. You need to plan for them.
U.S. health care expenses have grown mightily. U.S. health care expenses have dramatically escalated each year as new medications, new treatments, diagnostic tools, and health care innovations have come onto the market.
For example, the median nationwide cost for a hospital stay — excluding physicians charges — was ,280 in 1997; by 2004 it was almost double at ,455. The average total cost for treating a heart attack climbed 40 percent in just seven years. All in, health care costs have escalated fast and the increases are gaining momentum.
Health care costs are likely to continue to grow unabated. Unlike in other countries, no laws meaningfully curb the continual climb of health care and drug costs in the United States. For example, many Americans continue to import drugs from Canada because Canadian prices are significantly lower. This is true even though the new Medicare Features introduced in 2006 offset the cost of pharmaceuticals for U.S. retirees. To curb the cost of medicines, Canada prohibits drug companies from advertising on its television channels. In the United States, on the other hand, the very legislation that created the new Medicare drug benefit (Part D) expressly prohibits the federal government from attempting to negotiate lower prices with drug companies.
Count on it: medical costs are sky-high and likely to keep climbing unless there is a radical overhaul of the system.
More and more corporations are cutting back on health care benefits as medical costs soar. Recent statistics show companies cutting health care benefits and requiring employees and retirees to pay more for them. As one survey of corporate benefit trends concluded, “[Benefit] reductions have become not just common, but expected, with the only question now being of how much more of a reduction in benefits and or an increase in cost will be directly placed on individuals In the end individuals, either as taxpayers or consumers, will need to pay the bill.
I believe this trend will gain greater momentum over the next decades. It will be part and parcel of the continuing erosion of employment benefits — like the demise of traditional pensions — that is taking place throughout the country. Just like pensions, more and more health-care expense is going to become a do-it-yourself responsibility because heath care insurance costs are simply becoming too great for companies to shoulder competitively.
Taken all together, you can count on: (1) higher and higher health care costs, (2) more health-care-benefit cutbacks by U.S. employers, (3) the need to factor large health-care expenses into your funding plans, and (4) the need to buy supplemental health-care insurance to shield your savings from cost attack.
Of course, these views will not come as a surprise to most folks. Recent polls show that — immediately after the foremost financial concern of having enough money for retirement — the next great concern of most Americans is health care. More than half of adult Americans are “very worried” or “moderately worried” about being able to pay for serious illness or catastrophic health-care expense.
Health Care Scholarships that Offer More Than Just Financial Rewards
Health Care Scholarships that Offer More Than Just Financial Rewards
Did you know there are health care scholarships that offer you practical work experience in addition to financial assistance? Award-for-service scholarships are an excellent way for students pursuing college degrees in health care fields to start acquiring job experience immediately upon graduation.
How does this work? Well, these scholarships offer you a deal: In exchange for a scholarship that doesn’t have to be repaid in cash, you commit to working for a designated number of years in needy areas of the country or with needy populations after you graduate from your health care degree program. With one of these scholarships, you get financial aid, a job, and the opportunity to apply your new skills right away among people who most need your help.
No Shortage of Jobs in the Health Care Industry
Health care students are heading for careers in a thriving industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in health care has increased since the start of the recession (597,000 jobs added), while so many other industries have seen nothing but losses. In terms of long-term employment and financial stability, pursuing a health care degree is a good choice.
Why Get a Health Care Scholarship that Requires a Work Commitment?
It’s true that there are health care scholarships that don’t require anything of you once you or your school has received the money (other than the obligation to complete your degree program, that is). There are need-based health care scholarships available only to students who can demonstrate financial need. There are also merit-based scholarships that are based only on the applicant’s achievements or accomplishments.
However, recipients of health care scholarships that will put their skills to work soon as they graduate will feel good about knowing that their scholarship money is well earned. Even better, these graduates can count on employment in their field, since they’ll be serving communities where health care is falling through the cracks. The value of on-the-job knowledge plus the unique satisfaction that comes from helping others creates a fulfilling life experience that will benefit you both professionally and personally.
Here are some examples of health care scholarships that offer the scholarship-for-service exchange:
Health Professional Scholarship: Eligible applicants must major in health sciences and services at the undergraduate (juniors and seniors only), master’s, or doctoral level. Recipients must work in a designated health care shortage area in the state of Washington for between three and five years. Texas Tech Rural Health Education Scholarship: Eligible applicants must be Texas residents pursuing a degree that leads to licensure as a health care professional. Applicants can be undergraduate, graduate or doctoral-level students. Recipients must work in a rural Texas community in their health profession upon graduation. Health Professions Education Scholarship: Eligible applicants must be U.S. citizens and California residents and either undergraduate (juniors and seniors only) or graduate students. Recipients must work in their health care profession in an underserved area of California upon graduation.
Health Care Scholarships and Helping Others
With the country’s ever-increasing need for health care services, a career in health care is a good choice from a job stability point of view. But you probably didn’t decide on health care just because of job stability. You probably like to help people, too. Health care scholarships that offer you financial aid in exchange for your services after you graduate can be a deal that benefits everyone.