Kulturraumstudien USA, Work for Week Six (April 27-30)

**Announcement**: the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn is organizing an online lecture series centered around the 2020 presidential election. Check out their website for more information (registration per email is required to participate): https://www.nas.uni-bonn.de/Events


This week's topic is health care in the United States, both in- and outside of the times of corona. If you remember from last semester, I told you that one of your short-answer questions on the exam would be to formulate a research question related to US cultural studies and to tell me how you would go investigating it. (You are welcome to prepare these in advance and to send them to me via email for feedback.) Therefore, our content this week will be led a variety of research questions pertaining to the US healthcare system.

Question 1: Why is the United States the worst-hit country by Covid-19?
Watch the video "Why is America's death toll so high?" from the Economist and answer the questions below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMLop-jR8cw
1. Why does journalist Idrees Kahloon argue that the United States "would have always found fighting a pandemic difficult, regardless of who the president was"?
2. What prevented private companies' tests from getting to the market quickly?
3. How is the US federal government's hands tied when it comes to regulating testing?
4. What accounts for the fact that the corona crisis and response to it is taking radically different forms in various states?
5. How has politics influenced the way states have responded to corona?
6.  What is Idrees Kahloon's explanation for why the US does not have the number of ICUs it would need to adequately tackle corona?
7. What percentage of the US population is uninsured and what percentage is underinsured when it comes to health insurance?
8. Why might some lost their health insurance during this time?
9. What funds are being used to reimburse uninsured corona patients?

Question 2: Why is healthcare so expensive in the United States?
Watch the video "Why the US pays more for health care than the rest of the world " from the PBS News Hour and answer the questions below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBPKE28UF0
1. What drives pharmaceutical prices up in the United States?
2. How much of the US GDP is spent on healthcare?
3. Why are people in the US "stuck buying American" when it comes to their pharmaceuticals?
4. How have mergers and acquisitions within the US health industry driven pharmaceutical prices up?
5. How has medical coding become an industry in the US?

If you have been following the 2020 primaries (and if you followed Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2016), you know that "Medicaid for all" is a proposal that has been brought up in the Democratic debates. This leads us to our third question, which is: What is Medicaid?
Watch the video "Medicaid explained" from Vox and answer the questions below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOo_aw-xgHQ
1. Who lobbied against a national healthcare program in the 1930s in the US?
2. How do Germany and France treat private insurance companies differently than the US?
3. How did Medicaid get started?
4. What is the difference between Medicare and Medicaid?
5. What part of the Affordable Care Act did the US Supreme Court shoot down?
6. What are block grants?

Question 4: Why are African-Americans disproportionately contracting the corona virus in the US?
Watch the video "Why black communities are more at risk for contracting corona virus" from the Washington Post and answer the questions below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf_AqTiOOKc
1. What resources necessary for treating and preventing the spread of the corona virus are lacking more in African-American communities versus predominantly white communities?
2. Why have some African-Americans lost trust in health providers?
3. What do labor trends in the African-American population have to do with highest Covid-19 contraction rates?
(This video references the Tuskegee Experiment, a horrendous violation of medical ethics in which African-American men were intentionally denied treatment for a disease in order for the federal government to use them as a control group in a medical study. More information can be found here: https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm The lasting effects of this is highlighted in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu98KN4acis)

Question 5: Why is the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) still controversial?
Watch the video "Here's Why the Affordable Care Act Is So Controversial" from History and answer the questions below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryxbnSqN2Xo&t=5s
1. When did health insurance emerge in the US?
2. What is the individual mandate?

Question 6: Why did healthcare premiums (i.e. monthly healthcare fees) go up for some people when the Affordable Care Act was introduced? (This is crucial for understanding some resistance to universal healthcare in the United States.)
Watch the video "Obamacare premiums" from CNN and answer the questions below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqPM5WWd2OI
1. Why did health insurance premiums increased dramatically in some states as a result of the Affordable Care Act?
2. How have many people on employer-based health insurance benefited from the new patients enrolled in Obamacare?

New music:
Tiggs Da Author "Georgia" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCRBofMzk8Y
Chaka Khan "Like Sugar" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RecY5iZn6B0