Universal Health Care System

In order for one to answer this question, we must introduce the notion that there are 3 attributes available when it comes to healthcare. Affordability, Universality and Quality. Affordability, being the cost efficient price of obtaining treatment, Universality, being the accessibility and distribution of a said health coverage, and Quality, the efficiency of the very healthcare treatment itself. Any country in the World, no matter how economically superior, can only have 2 of those 3 attributes. While I do agree that Universal Heath care proves beneficial in certain circumstances, It is crucial to understand that the system of Universal Healthcare can only serve beneficial in certain countries in accordance to a nations population and social structure. I will attempt to dissect the idea of the Universal healthcare system, while criticizing Universal Healthcare from a Moral and practical standpoint. As alluded to before, Universal Healthcare contains both 'Affordability' and 'Universality', 2 of the 3 attributes present for any given system. Unfortunately you must realize that this so called "free" healthcare is nothing but a figure of imagination. Of course, directly the system itself is free for the given individual, all guaranteed by payments from the government. However one must ask, where does the government accumulate its wealth? You have to realize that the government filters the money you provide in taxes (Usually much higher in socialized countries due to the excessive need to spend by the government) into medical training facilities, surgery operations, hospitals, and of course, healthcare. This of course means that the average individual is not only indirectly paying for their own possible healthcare, but also the healthcare of somebody else in their country. For example, the difference between a privatized healthcare system and a Universal Healthcare system is that in a privatized system, the only healthcare you are paying for is your own. If you did not need medical treatment over the course of 5 years, then you would not have to pay a cent for said healthcare, as it is not a right, but rather a privilege. On the other hand, in a system that has socialized healthcare, If you did not need any form of medical treatment over the course of 5 years, you would still be obligated to pay for somebody else's (Possibly) irresponsible lifestyle through such immense taxation. If the United States were to transcend into a country with a completely socialized healthcare system, then you would essentially find yourself to be paying for the surgery of somebody who had a few too many chicken nuggets in his or her diet. (I used 5 years as an example as it is more expensive to not receive medical treatment in France for 5 years (due to taxation) than it is to get surgery in the United States). My point here is that Socialized healthcare is expensive and that the affordability aspect is nothing but rhetoric. You claim that it is all great that every person, no matter how rich or poor are subject to the same wait times. Although this is correct, I do not see how this is at all moral to claim that it is fair for people who are rich enough to obtain healthcare by themselves be punished by waiting times (That often run into months) in the name of 'equality'. Another large criticism of Socialized healthcare is the unbelievable waiting time it takes for somebody to receive treatment regardless of their societal status. For example, there were over 25,000 cases of Canadians who lived in Canada, who travelled to the United States to undergo tumor related surgeries due to the extremely efficient quality of the American healthcare and rapid time for which the surgery takes. The reason privatized healthcare takes so long is due to the simple fact that it dominates in quality. In I hope this example does not serve as a straw-man argument as it is only a specific case, however when I myself broke my thumb in France, it took 4 hours for them to check my thumb and recommended me to somebody who could fix it, and 3 more hours for me to finally see the person they recommended. On average, the wait times for Surgery in the United States takes up to 23 minutes per person, in Canada it's 2.2 days, and in France it's 5 hours. Socialized healthcare simply does not work in cases where a countries population is too high for said healthcare system to run successfully. Now I do agree with you that Universal healthcare is a valuable healthcare system to implement in smaller socialized countries, it simply will not serve as a cost efficient or convenient system in a country such as the United States. Also, i'd like to point out that the reason people are healthier in countries where there is universal healthcare present is not because of the fact that there is such a convenient healthcare system, but rather because those countries tend to have a government that regulates food consumption and food production more strictly, thus leading to a healthier population. As I conclude my argument, we must ask ourselves what is the alternative to socialized healthcare, and what can we do to lower the prices of privatized healthcare in larger countries? Well, the answer is to completely privatize healthcare and enable firms to compete against one another in a competitive free market. If health insurance firms compete against one another, their objective will be to gain a larger profit but gaining more money. In order to gain money however, they'll need people who will buy their firms program. As history has shown us, if there ever was a situation in which a firm were to deduce it's price, more people would be attracted to that specific firms health insurance. Over time, more and more firms would compete against one another in an attempt to gain a larger profit and as the need for profit increases, the price of said healthcare will decrease. Laser eye surgery is a perfect example of this. In 1990, Laser eye surgery cost $4000 per eye, after competition ensued within certain firms, each eye costs around $300. To conclude, although I do not completely disagree with your premise that Universal healthcare is beneficial for certain nations under very specific conditions, I personally believe that it is better for a country with a population larger than 30,000,000 to opt with a more privatized approach to healthcare.