The Pros And Cons Of Universal Healthcare

The American health care system is dysfunctional. We can think of the American health care system as a series of tubes and each tube typically pay different amounts for the exact same medical services. That’s a lot of administrative work. To be affordable, health insurance needs a lot of healthy people for every sick person it signs up. But here’s the problem, health insurance is worth more to sick people than to healthy people. Sick people want it more and will pay more for it. So here’s what can happen. You get a really good health insurance package. Like, really good. So all the sick people will rush to buy it. Healthy people decide not to buy it because of all the sick people pushing up premiums. So the healthiest people who need health

These are the top three concerns of most Americans regarding the country’s healthcare system. Most Americans without access to health insurance would most likely point to cost as to why they are uninsured. And every year, around 50 million people are without coverage and the culprit is affordability. This relates back to Cutler’s point that costs should always be taken into account when weighing the advantages and disadvantages of universal coverage. Cutler believes that universal coverage is the right step given that healthcare is so vital to an individual’s physical and mental health as well as their happiness and outlook on life. With that being said, Cutler warns that rising healthcare costs coupled with perpetual increases in healthcare spending will eventually cause public programs to become financially

Cutler compares the 1960s when healthcare was much less expensive, only $900, to today’s costs, where the average American family spends on average, $8,000 on medical care. We outspend other similarly rich countries such as Germany, United Kingdom, France and Canada. Although Cutler points out that the gap has been growing larger and larger and will continue to do so. Even more alarming, “medical care in the United States has exceeded the growth of the economy by nearly 2 percentage points annually.” (Cutler, 2014). If rising healthcare costs outpace economic activity that could cause a ripple effect where businesses start to feel squeezed, which leads to workers and their families being squeezed financially. This leads to an endless loop where people start to pull out of their health insurance due to the costs, and insurers respond by hiking premiums. I completely agree with Cutler’s basic premise, we cannot focus solely on the access gap, we must also concentrate a great deal of time on lowering