Universal Health Care

There isn’t any problem with the quality of America’s health care system, the problem when it comes to health care in America is that so many people don’t have it and can’t afford it. We have over 300,000 physicians here, but we’re spending over 1.6 trillion dollars a year on privatized health care and forty-five million Americans in poverty are currently not insured without any way of seeking medical attention (Social Problems). Americans spend way too much on health care and our system benefits those who can afford it since 1/6th of the population isn’t paying anything and we’re spending way over a trillion dollars anyway. Every other developed nation has some form of national health care available to its citizens and they spend much less. America should adopt a Universal Health Care system because we can definitely afford it, we’re the only ones who don’t have it, and we could help a lot of people.

One of the reasons of poor health in America is our economic system. Nathan Karp, author and journalist for the Socialist Labor Party of America, with his article, “Capitalism Has Caused a Health Care Crisis”, blames the American economic system for our health care woes today. He blames for-profit hospitals for the fact that so few of those in poverty have any access to health care today (Nathan Karp). He says that ending suffering and misery in our social order comes from the fact that some to most Americans are completely motivated by profit. Health insurance companies deny claims, physicians perform expensive operations when they don’t even need it, and the young, old, and impoverished are the ones who suffer the most (Nathan Karp). Later he quotes French Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier “The physician desires sickness, the undertaker wants burials, and forestallers want famine to double or treble the price of grain” (Nathan Karp). He means that Capitalism makes people want bad things to happen to others so they can make money. No one should profit from human suffering, if people need medical attention, care, and help with their sickness there is no moral justification to deny people heath care.

One of the arguers of better health care in America for people who need it is Daniel Callahan, Professor of Philosophy and elected member of the Institute of Medicine. Dan says in his book Setting Limits that we need to stop putting so much money into keeping the old folks alive, try to give them better ending years of their life, and focus more of our attention on children. That means doing cheaper treatments on them like better access to painkillers and nursing homes instead of trying to keep 90 year olds running with expensive steel replacement bones (Dan Callahan). He generally goes against life-extending technologies for the elderly because of the immense costs and asks that we instead turn our attention and resources towards keeping children healthy, giving them happy childhoods, and prompting them to create a better future. This doesn’t mean disrespecting our elders, it means focusing on making them as comfortable as possible in their later years and helping the new generations so they can have better lives overall so they’ll help the planet, their own children, and us in our later years. If children were all kept healthy and happy we may not need to spend as much on health care as we do currently (Dan Callahan).