Comp II
The United States should have Universal Health Care
Virtually 50 million Americans are presently without any health insurance, and a great number of them with health insurance are struggling to pay for their medical bills. Everybody concurs that healthcare must be accessible to all citizens, but the debate on whether the United States should adopt a universal health system still rages. According to the Institute of Medicine (2002), the U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee that its citizens have health care coverage. President Obama pledged to reform the country’s healthcare system by increasing health coverage and …show more content…
According to Garber and Skinner (2008), the normal life expectancy of an American citizen is around 78.2 years, ranked the 27th highest than the average for developed countries of 79.5 years. The United States also lags behind in various measures like infant mortality rate, as well as probable years of life lost with regards to the WHO report (Institute of Medicine., 2002).
Moreover, opponents to the universal healthcare system assert that free care would result into extreme waiting periods and an absence of drug improvement from pharmaceutical firms. Nonetheless, such claims are baseless; evidence demonstrates that wait periods have very minimal concerning universal health care. According to the survey report provided by the Commonwealth Fund in 2005, only 30% of the Americans had the potential to visit their physicians on a similar day they were sick, the lowest figure compared to any other nation besides Canada at 23 percent (Vladeck, 2003). More significantly, 51 percent of the country’s patients detailed having medical necessities unmet because of costs, a figure that nearly doubles that of Canada. This is a case of an issue that could be solved if the country adopts a universal healthcare system.
Besides the costs outlined by the IOM, there are various sections of the economic ineffectiveness due to a lack of universal health care in the country: there is the unnecessary utilization of the ER, which is an expensive place to get care. Jack, Robert