Healthcare is the general term used for the entire sphere of prevention, intervention and cure of illness and disease using the facilities of medical experts and resources. According to The World Health Organization, healthcare embraces all the goods and facilities designed to encourage health, including preventive, curative and palliative interventions, whether directed to people or to populations. Jointly, this provision of medical facilities would be known as a healthcare system.

The English speaking world used to call this subject just medicine or refer to it the health sector which basically meant the same but it was before the term health-care was coined. Even in most developing countries there is a form of health care provision for everyone whether they are in a position to pay or not. It was the United Kingdom that pioneered the first population based health care system back in 1948 called The National Health Service run by each successive administration.

In Italy, they have a system that works by making everyone pay into a administration funded insurance scheme which The World Health Organization consider the second best health care system in the world. Other examples are Medicare in Australia, established in the 1970s by the Labor government, and by the same name Medicare in Canada, established between almost twenty and 1984. universal healthcare contrasts to the systems like health care in The USA or South Africa, though South Africa is one of the many countries attempting healthcare reform. people who work in healthcare include all professionals whose job it is to uphold life, treat and cure illness and try to better the health of people. The collective term for this is the healthcare industry but the word industry may not necessarily be the best one to use.

Worldwide, over recent decades, there has been a huge increase in the amount of money spent on healthcare and it is now one of the fastest growing sectors in every developed country with an average cost of 10 percent of the gross domestic product. Although in 2003 the health care costs paid to across the entire health care system, consumed 15.3 percent of the GDP of The USA, the biggest of any country in the world and is expected to reach almost twenty percent of GDP by 2016.

In The United States there are 180 million Americans who want health care and a recent study showed that it was the number one concern of those seeking employment. A issue which came to a head when General Motors was seriously considering bankruptcy over the strain its health car plan was putting on the company. It was only after negotiations with the unions to reduce certain health benefits and the subsequent sell off of its poorly performing finance division that stopped the unthinkable from happening.

The American healthcare system costs a great deal to employers but it is the number one thing that potential employees look for in an employer and has seen many shifts in how people view working for any given company. Possibly it is time healthcare was looked at in a different way and perhaps called health preservation with an emphasis on fitness and health to ease the need for a top heavy healthcare system which is becoming a world-wide issue.

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