My 101st Debate: Universal Health Care

Thank you for your case, bsh!I have no doubt that this will be a great debate.== NEG CASE ==C1) TheftIn order to make this argument, I'm going to to be challenging the framework of the debate set out by Pro. My opponent has done an acceptable job of defining exactly what a "just society" is for the purposes of this debate-- a government which conforms to that which is "morally upright or good". However, he then goes on to claim that because the government is not allowed to engage in 'ideological favoritism', it must by default resort to utilitarian cost/benefit analysis in order to determine what is just. This is blatantly self-contradictory; Pro is simultaneously asserting that the government cannot prefer a single ethical system *and* that the government should prefer a utilitarian system morality. I could just as easily assert that because the government shouldn't favor one ethical system, they should by default resort to the minimalist libertarian role of simply protecting the natural individual rights of its citizens and doing nothing more. It is true that "public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values". However, this does not warrant Pro's hypocritical solution of then arbitrarily giving absolute preference to a single system of morality. So, unfortunately for Pro, we cannot simply accept his utilitarian framework as readily as he would like us to; due to the ethical nature of the resolution, the debate's moral framework will inevitably be a significant clash-- we must determine what is "morally upright or good" in order to determine what a just government would do. Predictably, I will be advocating for a libertarian rights-based morality. What follows a brief justification of the existence of these fundamental human rights: One of the fundamental axioms of any ethical system is that every human being has ownership over his or her own person/self. To deny that humans have this personal autonomy is to deny that there is anything morally significant about humans in relation to the rest of the amoral universe, which basically negates the need for morality to exist at all. In other words, the only way to rationally deny that human beings possess ownership over themselves is to take up a nihilistic view, which is disallowed by the nature of this debate. From this concept of self-ownership, we can derive all the major natural rights possessed by humans: life (because life is the most essential component of the self), personal liberty (because that is the definition of having 'ownership' over oneself), and possession of rightfully acquired property (because the self is the ultimate source of its labor and should thus own the products of that labor). These natural rights are characteristics inherent in humans, basically being extensions of their personhood. Given this premise of inviolable human rights, it would seem that a government, an entity which by definition exists to exert coercive control, could not justifiably exist. However, there is one contractual formulation of government which is compatible with Libertarian morality-- the government, in exchange for limited control over its citizens' liberties (i.e. ability to enforce laws and collect taxes), serves to protect the rights of those citizens. Therefore, any policy in which the government uses the power granted to it for purposes outside of or contrary to the protection of rights is unjustified; it is fairly obvious that UHC falls directly into this category-- it does not serve to protect any natural rights, and it benefits a relatively small minority at the expense of an increased burden (higher taxes) being forcibly imposed upon the entire population. Like many forms of redistribution, UHC can be seen as government-enforced theft; yet such a violation of rights can not be considered something that a 'just government' would do. People cannot be coerced into providing for those who they do not wish to provide for.C2) EconomicsEven presuming a utilitarian standpoint, UHC would still create more problems than it solves, primarily in the form of economic harms. It goes without saying that implementing a Universal Healthcare plan would require a substantial amount of resources; there are typically two methods that governments utilize in order to obtain such resources-- taxation and foreign borrowing. The former is an absurdly futile endeavor which mitigates the whole purpose of UHC in the first place by just draining money away from the very same people that it is supposed to be providing with "free" healthcare... Meanwhile, the latter is widely recognized as being harmful to any country's well-being in the long term, both in terms of economics (from debt) and international relations (from political power) [1].No matter how much one may support UHC, a brief glance at the question of how such a policy would be funded is quick to bring them back to reality. Virtually no government has the financial capability to successfully run a UHC program without creating large scale economic harms. Another thing we might consider is the general trend among welfare-type policies such as UHC of creating a vicious cycle of dependency among those who receive government aid, ensuring that they indefinitely remain dependent on the government's support and ultimately a burden on society. In 1987, only 18.3% of the people who received welfare benefits actually escaped from poverty, whereas 45% of the impoverished people who did not receive benefits did escape it [2]. The implications are clear-- handing healthcare benefits to the poor is not necessarily the best way to solve their problems. Non-profit healthcare groups are far more effectively able to provide aid to the uninsured where needed without incurring the draw backs associated with government-funded welfare.C3) QualityThe natural result of extending healthcare to *everyone* in a country is *everyone* taking full advantage of it, thus overloading the country's healthcare facilities and causing extremely sub-par quality healthcare to become a regular feature of countries with UHC. There are quite a few cases studies we could look at in which this problem becomes evident: 1. "In Canada, with a population of 25 million, some 1,350,000 people are waiting for some kind of medical service, with some 177,000 of them waiting for surgery of some kind, of which 45 percent report they are waiting "in pain." For example, waiting periods for health care procedures in Canada average 5.5 months for heart bypasses, 5.7 months for hernia repairs, 7.3 months for cholecystectomies, 6.4 months for hemorrhoidectomies, 8.3 months for varicose vein treatments, 3.7 months for hysterectomies, and 7.1 months for prostatectomies" [3a]. 2. "...out of [Great Britain's] population of fifty-seven million, one million Britons are queued up on extremely long waiting lists to see physicians for both routine and serious conditions, thanks to the rationing that follows price controls and budget caps. Indeed, the British tabloid press loves to sensationalize all too frequently, unfortunately, the deaths of patients still on waiting lists. On an annual basis for example, the number of British patients denied treatment include nine thousand for renal dialysis, as many as fifteen thousand for cancer chemotherapy, as many as seventeen thousand for coronary artery surgery, and seven thousand for hip replacement." [3b].3. "In Japan, government-subsidized physicians commonly have to see more than forty patients a day in order to realize sufficient revenues. Patients covered under government-sponsored health plans often use the private sector for faster, better-quality aid. If they can"t break into the shortage of private health care services, infirm Japanese have been known to pay steep bribes to circumvent the rationed health care system in order to get direct access to health care providers being reimbursed by the government through its global budgeting policies on what it will spend for the citizenry's health care," [3c].In short, UHC drastically lowers the quality of healthcare in a country, even causing many of the citizens it supposedly benefits to prefer privatized healthcare companies (which implies that they do have some degree of superiority to UHC in terms of flexibility and quality) [3d]. Such a system is patently counter-productive, and by no means can be considered just from a utilitarian standpoint.============CONCLUSION============First and foremost, UHC should be rejected because it is, at its most basic level, the government abusing its power to forcibly extract resources from its citizens and and re-distribute them, thus violating the social contract underpinning its existence. Moreover, upon examination of the practical aspects of implementing and maintaining a UHC program, we see that such a policy generally causes net economic harm and ends up providing the majority of citizens with sub-par quality healthcare, thus rendering it unfeasible even under Pro's utilitarian framework. Upon weighing it against the alternatives, there is very little question left as to what a "just society" would do. Universal healthcare is untenable. The resolution is negated.Back to you, bsh!_______________________________________________________________________[1] http://www.cfr.org...[2] http://www.cato.org...[3] http://www.independent.org...[a] Steven Globerman, Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada (Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 1990).[b] Henry J. Aaron and William B. Schwartz, The Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1984).[c] Naoki Ikegami, "Japanese Health Care: Low Cost Through Regulated Fees," Health Affairs, (Fall 1991).[d] John K. Iglehart, "Canada"s Health Care System Faces Its Problems," New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 332, no. 8 (February 22, 1990): 566.