What do you do when you can’t afford health care and you get sick? Who pays for the doctor visits if the patient can’t pay for the visit? There are a lot of people living in America that either don’t have health care or can’t afford health care. Healthcare should be available to, and equal for, everyone. There are three factors that we must take into consideration when deciding whether it would benefit the United States to give everyone equal healthcare. The three factors include cost, availability, and the importance (morals and ethics). Right now, when the uninsured go to the doctors but don’t have healthcare, they either pay a lot out of pocket or tax payers pay for their visit with their tax dollars.
Medicine has advanced so much, but with those advances come high costs, like the cost of new medical studies and new machines. Countries like Liberia and Ethiopia are not as fortunate as the United States when it comes to all the medical advances such as medicines and technologies, but these advances make all the difference. This is one of the reasons we can’t just give everyone healthcare for free. Doctors need to be payed; they don’t work for free. The bills that are not paid come out of tax payer dollars. If we are already paying for healthcare out of our taxes, then why can’t taxes be either raised or lowered based on what they are paying already so that everyone is paying the same price. By do this we could equally divide the amount of money it would cost to so that the United States could have universal healthcare. Instead of raising taxes this would do the opposite and lower them if the cost was evenly distributed amongst everyone. for everyone and then healthcare can become universally equal. The article “Social Inequalities in Self-Reported Refraining from Health Care Due to Financial Reasons in Sweden: Health Care on Equal Terms?” by Anu Molarius, Bo Simonsson, Margareta Lindén-Boström, Marina Kalander-Blomqvist, Inna Feldman, and Hans G Eriksson, talks about how people in Sweden don’t go see the doctors even if the know they really need to just because they don’t have insurance and they can’t afford to pay out of pocket. Having universal healthcare would allow more people to feel more comfortable and willing to go to the doctor, if they really needed to, because they done have to worry about having to pay so much out of pocket if they are not insured.
Hospitals usually have only certain insurance plans they accept and if you don’t have that insurance you either must pay a lot of money out-of-pocket or must travel far just to find a hospital or a doctor’s office that will take your insurance. In the article “Why the EMTALA Mandate for Emergency Care Does Not Equal Healthcare “Coverage”” by Nicolas T Sawyer it talks about a mandate where people went to whatever doctor they wanted to in an emergency and didn’t have to pay if they couldn’t or if they didn’t have insurance. This mandate states that they must see you, but you are obligated to pay whether you have insurance or not. If the uninsured had the money to pay to go to the doctors this mandate wouldn’t have had to be enforced. They would have enough money to pay for insurance of some kind. This mandate affects the uninsured because when they are forced to pay whether they have the means to or not, that ultimately decides whether they seek medical attention in the first place or not. Most would choose not to go to the doctors due to the fact of not being able to afford the cost.
Society needs to ask itself if everyone should have the right to equal healthcare. The importance of healthcare, morally and ethically, come in to play in an issue like this one because people with healthcare may be indifferent about equal healthcare because it wouldn’t affect their lives. People in todays society only think about themselves, not necessarily because they are selfish, but because we live in a world that is very antisocial because of all the technology most of the world has access to. as humans most of us tend to think in the way if I have something good why change it, it’s the whole if it’s not broken don’t fix it mentality. We don’t look at the bigger picture and look at what everyone has or in this case doesn’t have. People with healthcare don’t think about those without and how they could fix that situation. Most of the time you hear people who have healthcare talk about people who don’t is when they are complaining about having to pay more taxes because of them. This issue relies so much on ethics because most people, like for example in Canada and New Zealand believe health care is a basic human right that everyone should have. In the article “Elderly Health Care Needs and Associated Factors in Terms of Health Inequalities “by Aysun ÇELEBİOĞLU, and Meltem ÇİÇEKLİOĞLU, it explains that the need of healthcare and insurance for the elderly has gone up significantly since people are living longer. Even though they are living longer, they are being diagnosed with diseases earlier, so they need healthcare to receive treatment and to receive the right medicine to get better. This is especially important because since the elderly are living longer, they must work longer before they can retire but if they get sick and don’t have insurance, they can’t get better and go back to work. When you get older your body doesn’t get better as fast, so they need the insurance so that they can get the best treatment.
When talking about healthcare as a right everyone should have, who is everyone? Is it citizens of the place they live in, in our case the United States, or should it be worldwide? Do we just let citizens have universal healthcare because they pay taxes? Some non-citizens do pay taxes though, so, then do we change it to whoever pays taxes receives universal healthcare. Should we take into consideration that if they can’t pay to go to the doctors to potentially save their lives, they probably are not even paying taxes? In the article “Global Health Equity and the Need for Interdisciplinary Medical Ethics Education: Do we Really Mean Everyone? “by Erin Vroom it says “In Mozambique, 42% of deaths of children under 5 are caused by preventable and treatable diseases like pneumonia, malaria, and diarrhea. Not only do they lack access to medical care and medicine to cure their symptoms, but there is no higher power fighting against the structure causing their problems” (pg.138). If these people were to come to the United States would they have gotten healthcare and insurance to help save their lives even though they were not citizens? In the Netherlands they have universal healthcare for everyone living and working there. The Dutch have a social health insurance law that enshrine equal access and solidarity.
As much as everyone would like to believe that making healthcare universal would just be all pros, there would also be cons including the government restricting what kind of healthcare and insurance you get. Some would argue restricted healthcare is better than no health care. The government would have specific hospitals where you get to go for medical attention and they would have preapproved doctors, who you get to get seen by when you are there. This is one of the things the Netherlands has, yes, they have universal healthcare, but it is controlled by the government. Another down-side would be how we would decide who gets the universal healthcare, do we just give it to everyone who lives in the United States? Would there be requirements you have to meet to be considered to receive this universal healthcare? Do we only give it to the United States citizen? These are the questions the government must ask themselves whenever they discuss this topic because how do you make something equal for everyone so that everyone benefits and that’s its fair. Its not as easy especially when you live in an a very opiniated world like we do.
Health Care is a luxury in the United States that not everyone is granted but why? In other countries like Canada they give all their citizens healthcare. They see it as a right and not a luxury. The government is putting the message of “we want your money first then well save your life” with the way they keep putting this issue to the side. Healthcare is very important to many people, especially to the people who are sick, have medical conditions, or have sick family members, but why does someone have to face a life or death situation to fight for healthcare? It is important to have insurance when you have a medical condition such as cancer when you need continuous treatment and hospital visits, nobody can ever be positive they will not get cancer or another disease that requires treatment. Even something as simple and small as the common flu can kill if not treated properly or if its worse that you know, but without insurance most people won’t go to the doctors to check. When doctors go to school to become doctors the pledge an oath to save lives and do whatever they can to help people, but now it is more like they’ll help you if your insurance covers the procedure. Therefore, universal healthcare would be a good idea to put into place.
After considering all the cost and benefits the United states would gain for universal healthcare, this is still such a difficult decision just because of all the factors that come in to play. If the united states figured out a way to equally divided out how much it would cost to make healthcare universal, it would lower taxes and people would be all for it because they get something out of the deal. They get both universal health care and their taxes lowered. No, the taxes probably wouldn’t be lowered by all that much, but for the uninsured knowing that they could potentially go to the doctor’s if they needed to and not have to worry about paying so much would save so many lives. If the Untied States Government decides that this wouldn’t benefit them or benefit the United States, they need to investigate coming up with a healthcare plan that will work with the uninsured and with the ones who can’t afford health insurance because like in counties like Canada the United States should view healthcare as a basic human right.
Works Cited
- Molarius, Anu, et al. “Social Inequalities in Self-Reported Refraining from Health Care Due to Financial Reasons in Sweden: Health Care on Equal Terms?” BMC Health Services Research, vol. 14, no. 1, Nov. 2014, pp. 605–611. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1186/s12913-014-0605-2. Pg. (1,2)
- Sawyer, Nicolas T. “Why the EMTALA Mandate for Emergency Care Does Not Equal Healthcare ‘Coverage.’” Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health, vol. 18, no. 4, June 2017, pp. 551–552. EBSCOhost, doi:10.5811/westjem.2017.5.34826. (p.551)
- ÇELEBİOĞLU, Aysun, and Meltem ÇİÇEKLİOĞLU. “Elderly Health Care Needs and Associated Factors in Terms of Health Inequalities.” Turkish Journal of Geriatrics / Türk Geriatri Dergisi, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2013, pp. 315–321. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=90645391&site=ehost-live.
- Vroom, Erin. “Global Health Equity and the Need for Interdisciplinary Medical Ethics Education: Do We Really Mean Everyone?” International Journal of Science in Society, vol. 3, no. 2, Apr.2012, pp.137–146.EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=91821676&site=ehost-live. Pg. (138)
