Universal Healthcare..unrealistic or not?

If the liberal argument is that healthcare is too exclusive towards people that cannot afford it and that the national debt is out of control, how are we going to fund the closing of this gap, especially when government is in a black hole of debt?

I don't even understand why this is such an issue. I don't understand why the Dems are even pushing this in the first place, it's an expansion of entitlements that will completely defund other programs that are on the brink such as Social Security--not that I had any hope of saving Social Security.

Haha I guess at the end I just meant that despite Canada/France being successful you can't ignore the many many other nations that technically are listed as having universal healthcare that have been anything but triumphant.. and some other things that I'm too lazy to type right now. Regardless, I kind of like your argument better anyways :)

I definitely agree with you that minimum access is not enough, and you give great examples of cases in other countries where this minimum access universal healthcare is obviously not achieving its goal of improving overall health. I also agree with you on everything you said about countries that advertise having 'free healthcare' and socialized medicine, and believe that those are not very good systems and would never even remotely be possible in the US.

It is important to make the distinction you made between the status quo universal healthcare and an ideal version, and to also talk about what would be plausible here in the US. Last night, Obama actually said something that I agree with - he said if he were to create a healthcare system from sctratch, he would create a single-payer system because of all the efficiences that would be gained from it (those benefits I mentioned in my initial post). However, with over half of the American population already receiving health insurance from their jobs, this type of ideal system is not possible. He then went on to talk about his own healthcare proposal (which I am not really sure how much I agree with), but my own thought on the issue is that if the government just created a basic plan that everyone who paid taxes had access to, and then insurance companies provided better plans through companies for the people with jobs and more money, that would be the most plausible system.

Again, this brings us back to this minimum plan and how it wouldn't be enough to truly help the health of Americans... and I agree. However, I would have to say that it would be better than the alternative (these people having no health insurance at all). And I think there would be much debate over what all to cover in this general basic plan, but I would assume that it would focus more on preventive and long-term care (allowing people to go for regular check-ups and to go in for minor things like sore throats and fevers) because this is what truly improves health in the long-run (as opposed to the temporary healthcare that people seem to receive from their universal healthcare in other countries).

The only reason I see this happening in the near future is because people are becoming more and more aware that 47 million people do not have health insurance and people are becoming more afraid about the rising costs of healthcare (these are the two largest concerns in healthcare). This American version of 'unversal healthcare' would be the first step in the right direction towards solving both of these problems.

Universal healthcare may be possible in providing minimum access but minimum access alone is often misunderstood for being enough- if a patient is diagnosed with the same illness each time he takes advantage of whatever minimum care available (that is, what is most commonly outside of America defined as a diagnosis and a prescription that will last for a month), this is futile if the patient is not offered any long-term aid (which would be categorized as care past the minimal level.) For instance, I volunteered at a clinic in Canada and the patients would simply get a very temporarily relief. When asked what would happen to the patient, a physician responded that he would come back maybe once more but after that due to the lack of proper sustained treatment, give up. Hence, sure some substandard version of a universal health care may be plausible, but it is not necessarily the best solution. And although in most cases the argument can be made that a minimal level would make a difference, in the case of health, not necessarily.

Although you may not consider nations like Costa Rica as having universal healthcare, they are labeled as having this type of system. And in regards to the lines for procedures, I guess I meant more along the lines of there may not be a high demand for whatever facilities available, but regardless it does take forever to go through the system. What are labeled as status quo aren’t just the systems developed in Canada/France. Even when the facilities are available in other nations with “free healthcare”, extended healthcare takes forever by the time you go through the government. There was a case of some person in Nicaragua who was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma and although the facilities were more than available (lymphoma by no means is all that prevalent in Nicaragua so the given resources were not already obsolete/used or anything), the time it took for everything to get processed through the system, any major treatment would have been ineffective.

I agree however that an IDEAL version of the universal healthcare would yield overall improved health, and that nations such as France do not have the issue of paperwork, but those are situations found only in these nations. When taken into account the ‘universal healthcare’ from Costa Rica to Guyana, their systems are seriously flawed. Paperwork is more of an issue in these nations, more time is wasted, and the health of the population is severely worse. Statistics show that more time is wasted in the aforementioned situations. The time wasted/paperwork issue is simply more publisized When considering “universal healthcare,” one can’t just look at two nations and ignore the many others that do follow a very similar system.

All the reasons and advantages you have listed are of course true- that’s why France is considered to have the best healthcare system in the world. However this same situation is not working in really any other nation that have attempted at it (minus Canada.)

Even in regards to physician incentive, when I am referring to status quo universal healthcare, it is very much like socialized medicine. In Central America, for instance, the way their ‘universal healthcare’ system works is that doctors, following med school, are only allowed to open up their own private clinics after serving the government for a certain amount of years. In this situation (which is a lot more common to this day,) then there is an issue with enticements for doctors to stay in the federal funded work.

I guess my argument was really based off of the status quo. Yes, Canada/France have established a more superior system, but one can’t ignore the many other nations that are drowning in diseases with a flawed version of it. I never meant to imply that America has a more superior health system… with the amount of money we have, it is the most inequitable inefficient system existent. Moreover, United States has higher infant mortality, higher surgical mortality and lower life expectancy than Canada. Still though, I don’t see America switching over to the universal healthcare anytime soon, and I think the population size is the biggest obstacle in preventing it.

Moreover, an IDEAL version of anything in any given circumstance would obviously be the best choice in any situation. All the advantages listed are in regards to what an ideal system would entail.. however, how possible would that ideal system even be? The status quo version may be very plausible, however it has it has its fair share of flaws.

First, we should define universal healthcare as minimum access to basic healthcare services (preventive care, emergency care, standard procedures, etc.) in a timely manner to everyone in a country. If that is the case, then I think universal healthcare IS possible... but I agree that only if certain requirements are met. I feel like under this definition (or that which is mostly talked about as the definition of 'universal healthcare'), that most would agree it does exist in other countries like Canada, France, and the UK, so yes, its obviously possible.

You do need a certain amount of money and resources to achieve universal healthcare, and so that is why I agree that I would not consider places like Costa Rica as having universal healthcare. As for other wealthy nations (Canada, for example), I believe they have universal healthcare because they have the facilities and resources readily available to essentially everyone in the country who requires it (and btw, the whole idea of long lines for procedures is way blown out of proportion... if you look at the research, lines in countries like Canada are really non-existent except for a handful of cases and there are never really 'lines' for emergency situations).

Anways, I am assuming this topic was talking about the US, so I am going to say that universal healthcare IS even possible in a country like the US with such a large population. The main argument posed for why it would not be possible in the US is because they population is so large that we do not have the money for it. I agree that we would need a ton of money for universal healthcare, however, I do not think it would be any more than we already spend on healthcare (we already spend 18% of our GDP on healthcare... which is about double that of any other wealthy nation, but we have worse health). Most people don't realize that universal healthcare would actually SAVE us money in the long run in many ways:

1) It would allow people to have more preventive care and access to healthcare earlier on, thus increasing the overall health of the American population and reducing the total amount of money spent on healthcare (the largest amount of money is spent in hospital emergency rooms because of really sick people w/o health insurance waiting until the last minute to get help)

2) If universal healthcare is done through a universal plan, it would eliminate a great deal of paperwork and time (both of which = money) since everyone would be on the same healthcare plan (thus, allowing physicians, for example, to be able to spend more time treating patients and less time worrying about insurance companies and the business related aspects of medicine)

3) Healthcare insurance prices would reduce (thus, again, reducing the amount of money needed for universal healthcare) because the nature of insurance is that the larger the pool, the better it works and the more cost-effective it is. If EVERYONE was covered, this would add 47 million people to the pool, thus reducing the cost for everyone. Additionally, if you look at the typical uninsured population, it is not the extremely poor or old (these people are covered by medicaid and medicare, respectively), it is simply the low to middle income families or single adults in between jobs or in jobs that don't provide it AND who do not believe they need healthcare because they are relatively healthy individuals... again, if you add a bunch of mostly health people into the pool of insured people, you are adding people who will bring value to the system (they will 'pay' into but not use it as much) and so the overall cost will go down

I could actually go on and on about other advantages (more choices for the patient because not limited to 'in-network' physicians like HMO's limit patients) and ways it would save money (a universal plan would have more negotiating power over the price of pharmaceuticals, etc.), but basically the point is while it may initially cost a bit more to achieve if the gov't is providing universal healthcare, it should reduce costs in the long run. Actually, by simply rearranging where all of our money is going in healthcare [instead of spending huge amounts on extremely old people or on cases with very low survival rates if that money is spent of preventive care, if we have malpractice reform so unnecessary costily procedures do not take places because physicians are afraid of being sued, etc.] we should be able to afford universal healthcare.

My one big argument for why it would NOT be possible here in the US is because of how big and powerful the current health insurance industry is and how it would be very hard to get all these special interest groups to cooperate and be okay with a universal plan. Thus, its only REALLY a possibility if some sort of compromise is reached in which there is a very basic universal plan, but better plans are still offered by health insurance providers like they currently are (thus, keeping them in business).

Finally, there IS an incentive for physicians to support universal healthcare because they are not providing free services for anyone, these people have insurance and so physicians will be paid the same amount for their service as they normally would in a private practice (except in this case, the money is coming from the government instead of a private insurance company). So actually, the physician benefits from universal coverage because now people who wouldn't normally come in because of a lack of health insurance are now able to come in (so physician gains more patients). Furthermore, how it currently works is if a patient comes in for say, an emergency, and doesn't have health insurance, the hospital stomachs the cost (thus, eventually the physician stomachs the cost because he/she doesn't get paid for the service). However, with universal coverage, it’s the opposite (physician actually makes money). This is actually an important point to make about the distinction between universal healthcare (what I have been talking about) and socialized medicine (where a physician actually works for the government and gets paid by the government instead of having a private practice/working in a hospital)... so if anyone tries to pretend like universal healthcare=socialized medicine, please explain to them that they are very wrong

Universal healthcare is a very ideal possibility in most scenarios. Although, for instance, France has established the most realistic version of this "health dream come true," this may be accredited by the fact that France's population is small enough for a government to afford this. On the other hand, with nations like America, the amount of wealth that would have to exist before such a system can abide is colossal.. and hence improbable.
Even in certain situations where a nation is not heavily populated and universal healthcare is the supposed system available (most south/central american nations such as Costa Rica, Nicaragua, etc) the free facilities lack resources (medications or even something as simple as a urine test) so patients are left untreated. Moreover, if patients are in need of any serious medical attention (in instances of cancer, for instance) unless they are willing to wait years upon years for a response from the greater medical facilities for their free treatment (in which case they may be deceased by then)..patients are not any more better off in this type of system.

Hence, universal healthcare is the superior solution only if a) there are enough funds to support the population b) it is a small enough population c) there are enough resources, not limited to just medications/etc but also physicians themselves.

And even then, what incentive do doctors have to work for the government and provide free treatment to patients when they could earn more than the stipend provided by the govt if they opened their own private practice?