Project 2: Podcast Script

Introduction

My name is Quinn Reep and I am a junior at Glynn Academy, and a duel enrollment student at the College of Coastal Georgia. I have chosen Healthcare inequality as my topic of research for my English 1102 class's project two podcast. Today, I will introduce by informing you all about the history of healthcare; how it started and how it has evolved over time to what we have today. I will then be telling you what all of this information means, and why it has lead to the climate we are in now. I will end off on giving you information on what our climate is like and tell you what our future may be like. . I highly doubt that any offense should be taken by anyone, due to the nature and the topic I am covering, but I will apologize now for any negative feelings that people may have while listening. With that, let us start, and I will help you become more informed on our healthcare environment.

Body of the Script

As I said I will begin by giving you all a history lesson, based off of the information from David A. Ansell, and I would also like to state now that I plan on talking about the state of both national and international healthcare. I chose this topic because of my interest in majoring in the medical field of research, and because I hope to work towards making the access to good healthcare more available to people in our country and other countries. Society is already spending trillions of dollars on its healthcare yet most people globally do not have access to healthcare, whether it be the cost or the rarity of hospitals and doctors. With that said, lets start where medical care first began.

While the act of tending to wounds and giving cures and ailments to the sick have been around since humans have, things like the dedication of a single person to doing things like this and helping others around them, is what I consider to be a fairly modern practice. The first known and credited general physician wasn't around until ancient Egyptian times, or sometime around the twenty seventh century BCE, and though that was a long time ago, think about how long humans have existed and how recent this time really seems. Since then up until the invention and discovery of penicillin, a large portion of medical care hadn't changed since then. For hundreds of years medical care was based off of using herbs and experimentation with them along with religious belief to cure illness. People in China and India in the second century CE used this to cure diseased more common in those times. Europe would also begin to use these methods of treatment with the opening of a trade route that would span across the continent of Asia.

However, humanities most used drug and most powerful weapon against bacterial infection: Penicillin, was not invented until 1928 by Alexander Fleming, a Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary's Hospital in London. This fact will likely surprise as it did for me, because that would mean that such a simple thing like antibiotics, wasn't in use for an extremely large portion of human history, much less used to cure illness.

Also another thing to note, health insurance was actually invented and implemented into U.S. society by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, despite Penicillin being invented years prior, which surprised me a bit, but looking at it I figure that healthcare was even more important back before 1928 because of how lethal and dangerous it was just to get affluenza or even something as minor as a cut on your hand. Also it is important to note here that this point in healthcare history this is where the "corruption," comes in, which would lead to a vast increase in price of medicine and care.

This increase in value of medicine not only affected the U.S, it really affected the world in possibly the worst way possible. Due to companies realizing that healthcare had become something so crucial and important to life, the cost of medicine rose, therefore making doctors charge more for their services. Not only this, but because of how complex medical equipment is and how hard it is to make, the cost would rise even more, which put millions of people out of healthcare benefits and deny them the ability to be treated like the more fortunate. Also, this happened around the time of the Great Depression, just to make things worse. However, people in America, Europe, etc., had it much better than those in Africa. Britain had withdrawn control from their colonies a few decades prior, leaving African countries powerless, empty, and chaotic. Without money or large amounts of goods to trade with other countries, hospitals were not able to be built, and even still today, hospitals are scarce and hard to get to in places like those. Which brings us to now.

As we know, healthcare is expensive, just as it was a century ago, and as I mentioned, many places in our world don't have access to conveniences that we even consider to be commodities, and as you may realize, there are even some places, some people in our city in a similar situation, with absolutely no control over it. As for the future of the world's health climate? Well, there are efforts being made to help the less fortunate. Countries are being redeveloped, wars are ending, and outside help has been given. Though, there is a lot to do, and considering how much has happened this year, I personally do not see a quick and easy end to this problem. However, of course, you may see something different that I do not, some sort of potential for the world to be a better place within the next few years.

Conclusion

To conclude this podcast, I would like all listening to think about your own ways on how the world can go about fixing itself. There is no limit of time, think about what we would do, focus on, and who we should help first. And to finish with the thought, "what will come of this newfound reformation of healthcare? What new can we as a race do now that we don't have to worry about the effects getting sick?"