Health Care (Issue #1)

One of the United States' biggest of problems is its health care system. There are millions of Americans who are uninsured, because it is unaffordable. Health care is especially expensive because of the various competing private insurance companies that offer health care plans to employers. This is to be expected, being the United States is a capitalist society. It is because of this issue of affordabilty employers often switch to cheaper managed care, such as PPOs and less reliable HMOs.  To solve the issue of unaffordable health care, one possible idea is Universal Health Care. The Federal Government would be the single purchaser of health care, elimating competition between insurance companies, but creating affordable health care for everyone. The opposition to this view is that health care would become poor because competition is what makes health care better. Medical doctors would receive the same amount of pay no matter how skillful they were because they would all be working for the same insurance company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managed_health_care
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMO

One major inevitablity with our capitalist society is that fact that there will always be a separation of classes, upper, middle and lower. There are jobs to fit each category and that must be filled, such as janitors and Wal-Mart employees. For this reason, there are going to be some members of society who cannot make enough money to afford health care. By instilling Universal Health Care, only this one problem would be fixed, but others would come. For example, the members of the upper and middle classes, who probably have reliable health care already, would likely receive the same health care as members of the lower class. If you could afford great health care, why should you have to settle for less? The Federal Government would purchase equal health care for all people, ridding away any competition between insurance providers that give the incentive to medical doctors to take care of a person that is sick. Hence, Universal Health Care would be poor health care. Also, doctors are of the highest paid professionals in the world, with Universal Health Care, they would begin to earn less and less money until an evident downward trend was set into motion, discouraging the recruitment of new medical doctors. Even Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa says, "Doctors are ready to close their doors because of high malpractice insurance costs and low government remimbursement rates." Where would our health care be without medical doctors? Nowhere. We wouldn't have it at all.

http://healthpolicyandreform.nejm.org/?p=2366


Issue #2: http://katieireneiverson.blogspot.com/
Issue #3: http://noelleushistory.blogspot.com/