The United States should adopt Universal Healthcare

Pursuant to the instigator’s own debate format, I’m going to spend this round building an affirmative case against the resolution and will spend my remaining rounds offering rebuttals and closing arguments. Let me start by saying that I wholeheartedly agree with my opponent about their being a problem with the United States healthcare system. However, as opposed adopting Universal Healthcare, I submit to you, members of DDO, that the United States should adopt Free Market Healthcare. What is Free Market Healthcare you ask? It is a healthcare system that treats healthcare precisely like the beast that it is: A commodity.[Ex1] “But I thought healthcare was a human right, a social need”, someone reading this debate will no doubt express. Nope. Like automobiles and brick housing, healthcare is simply a product or service. It can certainly make life easier (or as my opponent expressed, longer), but it is no different than the countless other products and services out there that have made life great and those certainly have gotten by just fine with complete government control. The instigator is absolutely correct when he tells us that the reason a lot of people cannot afford health insurance is because the cost of healthcare is too high. However, the reason prices are so high is not because we don’t have Universal Healthcare. Rather, our healthcare system is not truly a free market system, basically a third-party payer system greatly regulated and incentivized by the federal government, where we rely on someone else to pay most of our bills, i.e., we use "insurance" that is funded mostly by corporations and the government. The problem with this system is fairly straightforward. As Milton Friedman puts it, there are four ways to spend money. [Ex2]. Category I: “You spend your money on something for yourself. Here you are very careful, because it is your money, and the good or service you are buying is for you.” [Ex2]. Category II: “You spend your money on something for someone else. Here you have the same incentive as in Category I to economize, but since you are buying something for someone else, you are not quite as meticulous when it comes to the purchase meeting the needs or values of the recipient.” [Ex2]. Category III: “You spend someone else’s money on something for yourself. Here you are not concerned about how much you spend, because it is not your money. But because you are spending on yourself, you make sure you are getting what you want.” [Ex2]. Category IV: “You spend someone else’s money on something for yet another person or persons. (This is what we ask our legislative representatives to do every day.) Here you are the least incentivized to economize, or to buy something that meets the needs or values of the recipient.” [Ex2]. Third parties, the government and private insurance companies, operate under category IV. They use other people’s money (i.e. taxes or premiums paid into risk pools) not to reach the best price possible, but just to reach a price that is “good enough.” What’s good enough for lobbyist and special interest group is all too often what’s good enough for the government. What’s good enough to compete with rival insurance companies is what’s good enough for private insurance companies. The problem is that there’s no real negotiation going on with the actual healthcare providers. Consumers have little to no reason to negotiate with the actual healthcare providers, much less seriously consider where they can get the best deal. After all, under this system, their concerns end at out of pocket expenses. As a result, we have rampantly high healthcare costs. [Ex4] As you can plainly see, the percentage of healthcare expenditures from the United States GDP has been rapidly rising since the 50s [Ex4] And as the expenditures have increased, out of pocket expenses have decreased and private and government health insurance expenditures have increased. Now imagine a system that revolves around the Category I method of spending money. Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine. Healthcare is a commodity, remember? Over the past 100 years, we have significant cost reductions in all sorts of products that we take for granted. Automobiles, air conditioning, video games, television sets, washer machines, computers, etc etc. All of this happened without the need of having someone else foot bill via insurance and healthcare can be the same. Even the poorest Americans own items today they would have never been able to afford years ago.[Ex5]. The instigator’s method of fixing this system is to give the healthcare industry over to a government that isn’t even enough competent enough to put together a mere website despite months of preparation and trillions of taxpayer dollars at their helm.[Ex6] Rather than do that, I propose Americans attempt treating healthcare like they do every commodity. But instead of leaving most things up to insurance providers, lets given the actual healthcare providers reason to compete with each other. Let us given consumers reason to go out and find the best deal. Do that and like every other commodity on the list I provided, it will quickly become readily affordable to even the poorest of Americans. [Ex1] http://www.conservativeblog.org... [Ex 2]http://reason.com... [Ex4] http://www.cato.org... [Ex5] http://www.heritage.org... [Ex6] http://www.nbcnews.com...