The State of Healthcare in America

The standard of medicine in the United States is generally agreed to be very high. There is no shortage of well qualified specialists, and there is a lot of individual attention. Treatment is backed up by the latest in the way of medical technology. Doctors and hospitals do their utmost not to make mistakes, because if they do they risk being made to pay out enormous sums in compensation.

But the American health care system has what look like insoluble problems. There are in fact two systems side by side. One is the private system run on the basis of free competition. The other is the public system which had to be created because such a large part of the population, including many of the elderly, could not afford to pay for the absurdly expensive private treatment.

The public system is vast. A huge proportion - more than 10 per cent - of the United States federal budget goes on it. Yet there are still very large numbers of Americans who are not covered even by this service. The government tries to keep expenditure down and so sets limits to the income of people using the system. Millions of the unemployed are another important group that is excluded.

Questions 90 to 100 refer to the following passage:

Any list of the greatest thinkers in history contains the name of the brilliant physicist Albert Einstein. His theories of relativity led to entirely new ways of thinking about time, space, matter, energy, and gravity. Einstein's work led to such scientific advances as the control of atomic energy, even television as a practical application of Einstein's work.

In 1902 Einstein became an examiner in the Swiss patent office at Bern.
In 1905, at age 26, he published the first of five major research papers. The first one provided a theory explaining Brownian movement, the zig-zag motion of microscopic particles in suspension.

The second paper laid the foundation for the photon, or quantum, theory of light.
In it heproposed that light is composed of separate packets of energy, called quanta or photons, that have some of the properties of particles and some of the properties of waves. A third paper contained the "special theory of relativity" which showed that time and motion are relative to the observer, if the speed of light is constant and the natural laws are the same everywhere in the universe.

The fourth paper was a mathematical addition to the special theory of relativity. Here Einstein presented his famous formula, E = m(cc), known as the energy mass equivalence. In 1916, Einstein published his general theory of relativity.
In it he proposed that gravity is not a force, but a curve in the space-time continuum, created by the presence ofmass.

Einstein spoke out frequently against nationalism, the exalting of one nation above all others. He opposed war and violence and supported Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they denounced his ideas. He then moved to the United States. In 1939 Einstein learned that two German chemists had split the uranium atom. Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him that this scientific knowledge could lead to Germany developing an atomic bomb. He suggested the United States begin its own atomic bomb research.