United States should switch to a Universal Healthcare System

Now, it's just too easy for someone to make an opponent of Federal Health Care into a bad guy and to be alarmed at the idea someone could be against it. But there is more to compassion than mere provision, and there are more consequences to Federalizing healthcare than the question of "Who pays?" The simple argument is that unfettering the Private Sector would enable it to do the job better. The American people can work through businesses better than they can work through government. Government programs are a monopoly, and there's no surprise that they act like a monopoly. That is, they provide lower quality resources at higher prices, and without the incentive to make long-term investments in things such as technology, better organizational practices, or efficiency. There's no incentive for a government hospital to cut the length of time one waits for a surgery, to turn down procedures that needlessly backlog busy doctors, or to reduce the cost - that is, the economic damage - of their services with even just effective resource management. Moreover, under a government provision, you have WORSE than monopoly, for you remove still the only competitive drive which a monopoly holds: The threat of non-use of the product. ~~~ Then there is the Economic argument. To put it simply, Free Markets => Reduced Cost => Increased Coverage Government Monopoly => Increased Costs => Higher Taxes => Less Employment => Reduced Wages => Reduced Standard of Living => Poorer Health => Increased Cost of Basic Health Care => Poorer Health Care ~~~ Rather, we should be focusing on reducing the aspects of modern healthcare which are keeping the basics of the free market from operating effectively. This would lower prices, and thereby increase substantially the number of people using healthcare, without compromising the quality of the healthcare provided. For instance: - Provide healthcare directly to the consumer, instead of through employers. The current system averages the price among all users, which means select outliers are bringing up the costs for everyone. Individual competitive pricing would lower the price for most consumers, and there are other ways of sponsoring healthcare for those who are driving up prices. - Require government grants to be matched by hospital resources. Currently, for instance, a hospital may apply for a grant to fund an MRI machine. But that hospital only does it for the prestige of owning one, and may not actually run enough MRIs to make it worthwhile from an economic perspective. Consequently, MRIs at that hospital are needlessly expensive, because a few tests are paying for the upkeep of an expensive machine, while at another hospital, MANY tests are paying for that same upkeep. Matching grants with current resources encourages financial discipline in hospital investment, rewarding and highlighting better hospitals. - We need to develop technology and resources which enable open but informed competition among drug companies, to begin with, that takes place at the consumer level. We also need to couple this with international agreements designed to encourage other countries to remove price constraints on drugs, because their price constraints are raising the price of U.S. drugs substantially, so that the U.S. market is solely responsible for the Research and Development of drugs worldwide. Pairing informed consumer competition (not easy, but very possible) with a world-wide competitive price of drugs would lower our drug prices dramatically. - We need to reduce the role of doctors as middle men as much as possible. Middle Men are an economic waste, as you currently have to pay for the information of a diagnosis before you can pay for treatment. Wherever possible, we should be asking the medical industry to find better, faster, cheaper ways of providing diagnoses and test results. That means consolidation and resource management, which can NOT be done in government healthcare. - We need to develop a method of isolating high-cost patients and providing them with secondary health care funding in a way which does not compromise the legitimacy of the free market system, and also provides additional resources to enable them to learn how to reduce their risk factors. Widespread social problems, such as obesity and smoking, are driving up health costs, and targeting these factors directly and selectively would help to reduce these as a factor driving up costs. This is how the system ought to be improved, rather than embedding ourselves in a government system which will cripple our economy to provide a shoddy quality of healthcare - a system also which is difficult or impossible to undo once created.