The Pros And Cons Of Universal Healthcare

“For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong.” –American journalist, H.L Mencken. A citizen’s health should be worth budgeting for. There has been much debate on if health care should be socialized that meaning the government guaranteeing health care coverage for those who cannot afford it. A policy of universal health care should be implemented in the United States. Universal health care would not be an economically sound idea, reduce the quality care, and be a government overreach. To begin, the economy cannot afford to provide universal health care. According to Ryan Whitacker of DecisionData.org, a non-profit data collection agency, “You cannot move from a system where 47% of healthcare costs are paid for

Secondly, having universal health care would reduce the amount of quality of care given. Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, reports that’s universal health care would not allow for quality care. “Britain’s Department of Health reported in 2006 that at any given time, nearly 900,000 Britons are waiting for admission to National Health Service hospitals, and shortages force the cancelation of more than 50,000 operations each year. In Sweden, the wait for heart surgery can be as long as 25 weeks, and the average wait for hip replacements surgery is more than a year.” As Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin of the Canadian Supreme Court said, “access to a waiting list is not access to health care.” Further, the government having control of what type of health care is provided would be an overreach. Dr. Bruce Vladeck of the

1998 Nobel Memorial Prize winner, Amartya Sen, PhD, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Thomas W. Lamont University and Harvard University states that “The usual reason given for not attempting to provide universal healthcare in a country is poverty. The United States, which can certainly afford to provide healthcare at quite a high level for all Americans, is exceptional in terms of the popularity of the view that any kind of public establishment of universal healthcare must somehow involve unacceptable intrusions into private life.” The United States budgets for a multitude of different expenditures such as National Defense, which according to nationalpriorities.org was allocated $598.5 billion in the 2015 fiscal year. Moreover, Dr. Sen reports that “Good results of universal care without bankrupting the economy—in fact quite the opposite—can be seen in the experience of many other countries.” Meaning that the national government can afford to cover its citizens if funds are reallocated. Further on the issue of affordability, Dr. Sen has found that, “Many medical and health services are shared, rather than being exclusively used by each individual separately. For example, an epidemiological intervention reaches many people who live in the same neighborhood, rather than only one person at a time. Healthcare, thus, has strong components of what in economics is called a “collective good,” which