Coast-to-Coast youth debate on health care

As part of his Senior Project, a North Beach High School student challenged a friend in South Carolina to debate health care. Here are their essays:

The Conservative Side of Universal Health Care

By Kevin Cadle

Ocean Shores

Imagine that you are sitting at home and happen to have a heart attack, a fairly common occurrence. A simple fix, right? Just call the ambulance, they take you to the hospital, your life is more likely than not saved. Now imagine that the hospital you are moving to is full, and the surrounding hospitals and clinics are the same. The medics have no choice but to make you stay in the ambulance with whatever help they can give until a room in the hospital opens up, a full nine hours later. That’s right, a full nine hours before your heart attack can be formally treated by a doctor. It may sound crazy, a nightmare even, but this is exactly what is going on out in Britain, a country that has implemented a Universal Health Care system. (Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7249514.stm)

If Universal Health Care is implemented, then the costs of most operations and drugs will be “free.” With that said, what’s to stop someone from going into the doctor because they have a random headache or the common cold? It doesn’t cost you anything, so just go in to get it checked out. The problem with that is the doctor’s and hospital’s time will be wasted on random illnesses than real medical problems. The result is inefficiency.

When the government takes over any specific sector, it usually turns into an inefficient new department. Seriously, name off one government entity that isn’t known for its failure. The most famous of these departments is the Department of Motor Vehicles, the poster-child for government ineptitude. Remember having to stand in line and deal with the lackluster customer service at the DMV? Combine that with some serious medical illness like cancer or maybe a snake bite and you’re going to end up with a lot of dead men and women. It turns out that when you go into the arguments against Universal Health Care, it is government inefficiency that it all comes back to. 

Universal Health Care would also eliminate jobs from the health care market. All public insurance companies would go out of business, destroying all jobs along with it. Even records keepers in hospitals would lose their jobs because with only one plan to keep track of, there would be no need for people to keep track of it. New jobs would be created by the transitioning system, but when the job levels run at a net loss because of this, people are still losing their jobs. In an economy such as this, we can’t afford to be killing off jobs.

Frivolous lawsuits are already a problem in the medical business today, and interestingly enough, the Universal Health Care system would also make this worse. Government-employee doctors, if something went wrong, could be liable for malpractice lawsuits. This means that the government, an organization with access to trillions of dollars in money, would be liable to have their money taken. If a patient or lawyer wants to take advantage of this, the government could be paying out billions a year to different people that their employees disfigured or killed. Again, in this economic climate, we can’t afford to be spending money needlessly.

For all of these problems, it should be pretty cost efficient, right? Wrong again. In the state of Wisconsin a Universal Health Care plan was introduced in 2007. The costs for the plan were $15.2 billion per year, which was $3 billion more than the state collected in all income, sales and corporate income taxes for that year. This was just for the health care plan, not including any other costs that the state had. In order to balance that cost, the state of Wisconsin would have to add $510 in taxes to each worker in the state. (Source: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/?id=110010374) This is just a taste of the costs at the national level, in a time that we are spending more than ever. With all of the inefficiency involved and a cost this immense, why would we go into this system in the first place?

Proponents of the system say that health care is a right that the people should receive, but nowhere does it say that in any document. Sure, you could take that whole “pursuit of happiness” thing from the Declaration of Independence, but in that case, I am pursuing the happiness of not having to pay extra taxes for Bill down the street to go and get some free Zicam. Another argument is that without restrictions on cost, people will go in to the doctor earlier to get treated without worry of the expenses. That’s a great idea, but the body depends on its ability to destroy invaders by itself to strengthen the immune system. If drugs are constantly administered to the body, then the general immune system is slowly weakened. In the end, it only makes us worse off to have so many drugs in our system.

When it comes to Universal Health Care, supporters’ hearts are in the right place, but in the end it is just too problematic and too costly to give such coverage to every person in the United States.

The Liberal Side of Universal Health Care

By Eric Norman

Charleston, SC

According to recent reports, 47 million Americans, 15.8% of the population are without health insurance. 25 million more Americans don’t have enough insurance to cover all costs. 68% of the former category and 53% of the latter have needed to forgo necessary medical care simply because it cost too much.

It doesn’t end there. In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the health care systems of the 191 member countries. The two top-ranking countries were France and Italy, both users of a universal health care system. The United States only placed 37th in that list. A vast majority of the countries ranking higher than America had one thing in common: Universal Health Care.

Take for example our neighbors up north, the Canadians. While the media portrays Canada’s health system as being one giant waiting line, this is largely untrue. A 2003 study showed that the average waiting time for elective surgery was around 4 weeks, as opposed to 3 months for America. Additionally, all Canadian citizens are covered by the system, so there aren’t any worries about people not getting the necessary surgery or diagnostic tests altogether, regardless of waiting time.

Canada’s single-payer government system allows the ability to keep market prices lower. Why do you think there are cases of prescriptions being bought from Canada instead of domestically? The price of medication is 60% lower than in the states due to government regulation. Additionally, the single-payer system allows administrative costs to stay lower. According to a study from 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the US spends 345% more per capita on health administration than the Canadians. This is because physicians don’t need to negotiate prices with several insurance plans or fight to receive payment from insurers. They bill the government, get reimbursed, and it’s done.

The top-ranking country in terms of Health Care, France, manages to balance universal health care with private insurance. All citizens are covered by the government regardless through taxes, but can supplement with private insurance if they wish. Even without this, the wait times the American media is fond of bashing are next to nonexistent. (Source for statistics: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=12683)

The overall message is that universal health care can work, and has been shown to work in several countries. Additionally, it does not need to completely nationalize physicians (as with Canada), nor does it need to nationalize insurance completely (as with France). However, the current system is not providing adequate services for the American public, and people deserve to go to doctors and be covered at an affordable cost.