The United States should design a universal health care system.

Hello Everyone, I want to start out by saying universal health care is not the solution to health care problems. First off, if you a believer that 45 million Americans are uninsured, stop smoking. Mark Steyln, a expert at Harvard University says that in that 45 million, 9 million aren't American, 9 million of them are actually insured, and 18 million of them are young and health and have no need for health insurance. The other millions left show to be wealthier than the average American. It shows that 37% of those without health insurance, that's 17 million, come from households that earn more than $50,000 a year. 19% or 8.7 billion of the uninsured come from households earning more than $75,000. So, for all of you crazy liberals that pull numbers out of nowhere, stop crying. Alright, I don't even know where to start with the problems behind it. First of all, it destroys our privacy. It will make everyone's problems our own. For example, if someone is eating unhealthy all the time, now we have to pay for them when they go to the doctor. Or if someone smokes 2 packs of cigarettes a day, now it will be our problem when they get sent to the hospital. The quality of universal health care would be horrible. The doctors would no longer have an incentive to provide quality care. Drug companies will not be making as much money and will have to cut down on research for new medication. I'm going to give you a perfect example why government ran health care is not the answer. My uncle who is an Army veteran is able to go to the VA which is a hospital that provides free health care to veterans. Two months ago when he had an extreme pain in his arm, he went to the hospital to see what was going on. The doctor he had couldn't figure out what the problem was, imagine that, so he referred him to a specialized doctor. That's great, but the wait for the specialized doctor was 37 days. So, here is my uncle having to wait 37 days for an appointment, while having a pain in his arm. Another great example of why government sponsored health care doesn't work, is Medicare. Under Medicare, the government forces doctors to perform duties at a certain price. For example, there is a set rate they must do surgery at and such. To bypass this, many doctors won't even accept Medicare patients because they don't want to be doing work for less money than it is worth. Now, before you start saying that doctors are too greedy and don't need all the money realize that they must go to school for 8 years and then have 5-8 years of an internship and residency. That leaves doctors no younger than 31 before they can even start to make money. I would like to see how you would react when you have that many student loans to pay off. We are definitely not the first country to think of this universal health care idea. There are many that are using it right now. For example, the great country of Canada. The one or two great stories you hear in the media does not mean it is working well for them. For example, a woman of Toronto had to give birth to quadruplets. The four girls ended up being born at a U.S. hospital because there was no space available at a Canadian neonatal intensive care unit. Is that what you would want to have to do when you're giving birth? Where would you run to, to give birth, can't go to Canada, can't stay here, is Mexico where you would want your kids being born? I sure hope not. On March 19th, 2005 Beth Duff-Brown reported in The Associated Press that a letter from a Canadian hospital to a New Brunswick heart patient in need of an electrocardiogram said that the appointment would be in three months, it also added "If there person named on this computer-generated letter is deceased, please accept out sincere apologies." Well, at least they give their sincere apologies hey? Oh wait, another example of why universal health care sucks. A 59-year old Ontario women on disability for a heart-related problem was complaining of age of discrimination after her local doctor rejected her. This was written on CTV.CA on March 17th, 2006. So, Great Britain is another country with great health care…right? Wrong, John Carvel wrong in the Guardian Unlimited on June 8th, 2007 saying, "One in eight Britain hospital patients still have to wait more than a year for treatments, the government acknowledged yesterday in its first attempt to tell the truth about health services." Another writer wrong in the BBC news on May 9th, 2007 saying that a third of stroke patients in Great Britain are stuck for over 3 months just to hear when they will be given their treatment. I don't know about you, but I don't think I want to be leaving my health care up to the government like that. Overall, you have to be crazy or communist to think universal health care is the key to the U.S. health care problems. There are many options that we can take to fix the problem instead of dealing with universal health care. The main thing we need to do is eliminate mandates. Mandates are things that the state and federal government require insurance policies to include. For example, there might be a mandate to have chiropractic service on your insurance policy. If we eliminate mandates, people buying health insurance can pick the things that they actually need and it will be much cheaper because they won't be paying for stuff that is useless. Another way to fix this problem is to control law suits against doctors. In this sue happy world we are in right now, baby doctors get sued all of the time if anything goes wrong in the labor. This leaves doctors needing more money which they get from the tax payers. I hope you all understand how serious universal health care is and realize it is not something you want to get the United States into.