The United States should adopt Universal Healthcare

Thank you Con - we will now move into the rebuttals phase.In Con's arguments, he makes the case for Free Market Health care, using the following contentions:1) Health care is a commodity and should be treated as such2) High health care costs in America are due to government intervention, and costs would be lower under Free Market Health care3) The government isn't competent enough to handle Universal Health careThis round I would like to take the time to rebut these claims and reinforce my own contentions..R1: Health care is not necessarily a commodityCon argues that health care is a commodity and thus should be free from government intervention and be treated as any other private enterprise. Now, I would like to pose the question - who would you feel more comfortable handling your health care: a government meant to serve its people, or a private company meant to make a profit? I do not wish to make the case that health care is a right, as that is not necessarily the point of this debate, but I would still like to make the point that treating health care as a commodity is dangerous. It incentivises health care companies to care more about the profits they make then the lives and well being of their customers. It doesn't take much research to find the many instances of private health care companies disregarding the well-being of their consumers in order to make a profit. Before the Affordable Care Act was passed, rescission was a severe flaw in the United States' primarily free health care market. "Rescission -- the technical term for canceling coverage on grounds that the company was misled -- is often considered among the most offensive practices in an insurance industry that already suffers from a distinct lack of popularity among the American public." [1] Under rescission, Health Care companies cancel the policies of those who are found to violate their contracts in the smallest of ways, for example, forgetting to mention your husband having high cholesterol when you desperately need gallbladder surgery. [1] Luckily, the ACA bans the practice of rescission unless in cases of obvious fraud, but this still conveys a very important theme - under Free Market Health care, the incentive is on the profit, and not the consumer.R2: There is no correlation between Free Market Health care and lowered costs -- there is a correlation between Universal Health care and lowered costsCon argues that under Free Market Health care, the price of health care will drop as companies compete and change their rates. The problem with this theory, however, is that the demand for health care is inelastic. Even if rates are high, the demand for health care will not change - this means many things. It means that the cost of health care would still remain high because demand would remain high. It also means that efficiency could decline in the free market system because health care providers would still benefit from high inelastic demand even when healthcare efficiency and quality remain low. [2] Thus, it is imperative for the government to impose regulation of cost of health care, and ensure quality of services. Above all else, however, the bottom line is that there is no concrete evidence that a Free Market Health care system is more efficient or less expensive than Universal Health care. As Paul Krugman, American economist and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University stated, "There are...no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work." [3] It doesn't take much research to see the plentiful benefits of a single-payer universal health care system -- lowered costs through preventative care, higher quality and more efficient medical care, more people covered, less deaths caused directly due to lack of medical care, higher economic productivity, and the list goes on and on. Compare the United States' Health care system with any other major industrialized nation on Earth and we can see how truly behind we are. The logical thing to do would be to go forwards, not backwards.R3: The government IS competent enough to handle Universal Health CareThis is, with all due respect, one of Con's weakest points. To conclude from the initial failure of the Affordable Care Act's website that the government is completely inept and unable to handle the burden of Universal Health care is absurd. Think of everything the government manages -- Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protections, the list continues on. [5] There is no evidence to suggest that Universal Health care is less efficient than any other system. So, to conclude, in no definite way is a Free Market Health care system superior to a Universal Health care system, nor has it ever been proven to be. The Free Market Health care system suffers from major flaws, including the inability to drive down costs due to the inelasticity of health care demand, incentive for profit, complete independence from government intervention in cases of crisis or need of subsidies, and lack of incentive to innovate and improve medical quality. [6]In contrast, a Universal Health Care system provides innumerable benefits over our current healthcare system or a Free Market health care system, including: providing more people with insurance coverage, lowering public and private spending on healthcare, increasing economic productivity through preventative coverage and removing unnecessary barriers to job mobility, increasing societal health and life span, saving lives, creating jobs in the health care sector, and lowering the federal deficit. The simple fact is that a single-payer Universal Health care is an objectively better system.Sources: [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com...[2] http://panmore.com...[3] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com...[4] http://www.pnhp.org...[5] https://en.wikipedia.org...[6] http://www.huffingtonpost.com...