Universal Health Care

As I'm sure most of you know, senator Hillary Clinton is running for president in the upcoming election. According to polls conducted by such organizations as FOX news, The Los Angeles times, CNN, USA today, ABC news, and numerous other organizations, of both the democratic nomination and general election, Hillary is leading. And in most of the polls, by a fairly large gap. So I think it's important that you understand just why one of her biggest platform-issues, universal healthcare, is something this country needs. So by the end of this speech I aim to have persuaded you that universal health care is affordable, feasible, and favorable.

One of the biggest issues, and hence the first I will discuss, is the cost and financing of the plan. Like any wide-reaching policy would cost, Hillary's health care plan costs a lot. I mean a lot. About $110 billion to be exact. Now to help pay for this, Hillary aims to implement a system that seems like common sense, by modernizing healthcare you'll save money. The RAND organization, a nonpartisan group dedicated to independent research, estimate that savings from modernizing our healthcare system to rely more on information technology can be as high as $77 billion per year. As well as switching to a less paper-oriented system, another major method to pay for universal health care is to discontinue the tax cuts President Bush implemented for those making more than $250,000 a year. The projected savings for this action is $52 billion, based on calculations from data obtained by the Tax Policy Center in 2004. Since Hilary's plan is universal, this unfortunately also means that it's compulsory. Despite this slight setback, this will help lower premiums since more people are buying it. Also, a survey in 2006 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that one in four Americans say their family has had problems paying medical costs and 30 percent had to delay some form of medical treatment. The same survey also found that people attributed this in large part due to rising drug prescription costs. Another measure of Hillary's plan is to lessen the barriers that prevent generic medications form hitting the market due to patents, allowing cheaper medications to compete with brand-name items. While yes these barriers are important for helping small business' to establish their product, more and more large companies have been exploiting legal loopholes to extend their patent shelf-life, such as a major corporation Bristol-Myers-Squibb, one of the major suppliers of anti-cancer drugs, which has recently been investigated and found guilty of illegally exploiting these loopholes. The allowing of generic products on the market would mean lower, and more competitive prices. To recap, Hillary's healthcare plan is affordable because of 1) Modernization of healthcare, 2) revenue gained from the discontinued tax cuts, and 3) the removal of barriers preventing generic medicines from being sold.

Now that we've looked at whether Hillary's plan is affordable, lets look at if it is in fact feasible.

In the previous study I mentioned done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it was also found that 56% of the