Health Care Paper

One of the most important policy questions of our time concerns what type of health care system the United States of America should employ. There are basically three choices for a health care system in America: a fully private system(capitalist), a fully public system(socialist), and a hybrid system(what the United States currently employs). There are advantages and disadvantages to each system, but what we must ask ourselves is which of these systems is the most moral and fair system.

Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of the Chicago Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic church says this: "Health care is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity and there is an obligation for society to ensure that every person be able to realize this right." I fully agree with this quote because I feel that health care is a very different service than a lot of other products offered by the market. I am a capitalist and feel that the market does many things well, such as providing agricultural and electronic products, but I feel that the government can provide health care better than the market can. I believe that it is immoral for people in this country not to have access to health care.

I believe that the current system in the United States(hybrid) is a disaster and contributes to massive amounts of paperwork and wasted time. I also feel that it is an immoral system because we have more than 40 million Americans without health insurance in this country. I will explain why I believe that a single-payer health care system is the right answer to our problem.

In a single-payer health care system, the government is the only payer to health care providers. Instead of having thousands of health care organizations that pay the health care providers(doctors and hospitals, etc.), there would just be one for most medical services: the United States government.1 This would dramatically reduce the level of bureaucracy, red tape and paperwork that I mentioned earlier.

Right now this is a gigantic problem because of all of the different agencies that handle medical claims. Sometimes doctors spend more time filling out paperwork than they do on seeing patients as a result of this. A single-payer health care system would prohibit for-profit providers from operating because advocates of this system believe that "profit seeking inevitably distorts care and diverts resources from patients to investors." I do not really agree with this statement but I do feel that the government can do a better job in streamlining health care and reducing costs.

I also believe that a single-payer health care system would be better because it would relieve the strain on our employers. Large rate increases in health care premiums are forcing some employers to cease offering health care to their employees. If the U.S. Government stepped in and offered health care then employers would have a big weight lifted off of their shoulders and could concentrate on making their businesses better and more efficient. Rawls asked us to look at situations as an observer who didn't know where he would end up. If we had to be born into a country then which health care system would we want to have? I believe that most of us would want to be born into a single-payer health care system because our current hybrid system leaves almost 15% of Americans uninsured. Now this information is from the Physicians for a National Health Care Program website, and PNHP is an admittedly left-wing website. So now let's examine the right-wing objections to a single-payer health care system.

Normally people on the right oppose single-payer health care systems