I recently decided that a national health care plan is necessary. It took me a long time to come to that conclusion, and I don’t reach it lightly. I also don’t propose to know how it should be implemented, but for various good reasons, I believe that a national health care plan is necessary.
The chief reasons I believe this are these:
- I believe that every person should have access to quality health care. The USA is the only industriazed nation without universal care. I believe it is a moral imperative that we care for our brothers and sisters.
- There are over 45 million uninsured Americans. A person should not die because they cannot afford health care, and they should not go bankrupt because they get sick.
- Private insurance is a wonderful ideal, and while I am a capitalist at heart, but the way that the private insurance industry works in the USA is fundamentally flawed, full of waste and excess, and corporate oversight is negligible. Corporations engage in practices that are focused on savings costs, not providing care. This is not the motivation that should drive health care. While the average health insurance company has a profit margin of around 2 – 3%, this is mostly because their companies and the medical system are incredibly inefficient. Between 20 – 30% of health care dollars go toward administrative costs.
- Medicare has an overhead cost of around 2 – 4%. It’s the most efficient and effective health care plan in the USA, and it’s run by the federal government.
Some of my capitalist friends will argue with me and tell me that it is the responsibility of individuals, churches, or capitalism to provide health care. While I don’t disagree with them in theory, in practice none of that is working. The individual doesn’t have the resources, nor do the churches, and capitalism is focused on making money.
I suppose that in theory you could have the entire country being altruistic enough or money driven enough to make the changes that we need, but I don’t see that as being realistic. I support a national health care plan and think that we should move to find a way to fund it.
