Healthcare and Education Should Be Free

Thank you for your argument, Pro. For starters, I would like to something up. For one, when I meant free education, I meant free community colleges/ two-year colleges but not free large colleges or universities that are not small community colleges. Community colleges already are very low-level when compared to other universities but are still a way to get education beyond the K-12 teachings for some people, so, as a safety net, community college should be free for those who need it. Now, I will state my reasons and rebuttals to Con's reasons. Rebuttal #1: Con stated that he/she believed that it would be too expensive to sustain free community college and healthcare. This is wrong, as if countries like North Korea can afford free healthcare and education, then so can we. There are a few things we can do, however, that can make free healthcare and community college/ two-year colleges free. To begin, as previously stated, we can cut military spending, as our military spending is way beyond other country's military spending. USA's military spending still dwarfs other country's spending, and if other countries can have great militaries with lower spending, then we can too. By cutting military and useless spending in the government, reorganizing the tax system to make taxes easier to understand and easier to pay, and by smarter spending, smart spending cuts, and a reorganized tax system, then the U.S. can afford free healthcare and community college without raising taxes through the roof (as countries like Japan that have very low-cost universal healthcare have taxes similar to ours). Rebuttal #2: Con also stated that he/she believed that free healthcare and education could make the quality of education lower. However, this is also not accurate. For starters, I only want free community colleges and two-year colleges, and these colleges are already not the highest quality, so making them only funded by taxes wouldn't affect their quality by to much. K-12 education is already pretty much funded by the government as of now, so the quality of our K-12 education right now is probably not being lowered by the fact that it's essentially free, as many states with free or close to free education have very good education programs. Healthcare, on the other hand, may have lower quality, but there is also a solution to that. Free public healthcare can still be free and available to all and funded by the government (which I believe can be done well if the government can spend and fund smarter). This would act like a safety net for people who cannot pay medical bills and would provide some level of healthcare to everyone. There would then be private healthcare, which would have to be paid for if you want it and would offer higher quality healthcare. This way, we would have free public healthcare with doctors paid for by government funding, which would naturally lower quality, but we would also have private healthcare, which would have to be paid for and would have higher quality. Many doctors today already work for public healthcare that is still have to be paid for and doctors who cannot work or cannot qualify for working in private healthcare can work in public healthcare. You can do this by restricting the number of doctors working in private healthcare in order to have a good supply of doctors working in both private and public healthcare in order to keep the quality of healthcare, and restricting the number of doctors working today is already what the AMA do today. In conclusion, while Con had some good arguments, his/her arguments are not good enough to show that healthcare and community college/ two-year colleges shouldn't be free. To live in a country that does not even freely provide people with their basic rights and standards for living would take way its citizen's dignity. This is why healthcare and community college should be free.