Universal Health Care in the U.S. There

¶ … universal health care in the U.S. There are numerous compelling arguments in favor of establishing universal health care access in the U.S.; this essay surveys the literature on this topic and presents these arguments.

Providing universal health care would benefit the country as a whole. According to Reuters, Harvard Medical School researchers found that each year nearly 45,000 people, or one every 12 minutes, die because they cannot get medical care (Heavey, 2009). This tragedy happens because Americans lack universal health care.

Access to universal health care should be a right of citizenship, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy and powerful. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have universal health care. As of 2011, thirty-two of the thirty-three developed nations have universal health care; the U.S. is the only exception (COTO Report, 2011).

A particularly convincing argument in favor of universal healthcare is that it would improve the broken health care system that currently exists. While many believe that the U.S. already has the best health care system in the world, this belief is contradicted by the following facts:

As of 2008, the U.S. ranked 29th worldwide in infant mortality, dropping from 12th in 1960. The U.S. is clearly growing worse by comparison with other developed countries (DeNoon, 2008).

As of 2007, U.S. women's life expectancy was 35th among developed countries, down from 20th in 1987 (Park, 2011).

As of 2007, U.S. men's life expectancy was 24th among developed countries, up from 32nd in 1997 (Park, 2011).

Yet, the U.S. spends more, $8,160, per capita than any other developed country in the world. In fact, the U.S. spends more than twice as much per capita as the second highest spending country in the world, Luxembourg (Peterson and Burton, 2007). With expenditures so great, and outcomes so unsuccessful, it is clear that the U.S. health care system needs to change.

These statistics and other similar ones tell the entire story: U.S. residents are not getting value for their health care money. In addition to the obvious positive affect that universal health care would have on the health of U.S. residents, universal health care would drive down the cost of health care. Privatized health care costs are incredibly inflated. The U.S. spends from 50% to 100% more on health care administration that on single payer systems, such as Medicaid (Battista and McCabe, 1999). The billions of dollars represented by differences between the two sets of figures are primarily profits that go to the insurance industry. With the government regulating health care costs, these costs and overall costs would be reduced. And, one of the strongest arguments for a universal health care system is that working models already exist in such countries as Germany, Switzerland, Canada and Taiwan (Ireland, 2011).

Universal health care is the key to improving health care in this country. Additional reasons to support universal health care include the huge number of uninsured Americans. According to CNN, 49.9 million people, or 16.3% of the U.S. population lack health insurance, (Christie, 2011), a circumstance which many people see as a national disgrace.

Providing universal health care would also encourage patients to practice access preventive care. Many Americans who are uninsured or who have insurance but face high deductibles forego doctor visits for minor health problem or preventive medicine. This results in health problems that could be caught at an early stage or prevented altogether going untreated until they become major health problems. With universal health care, routine physicals and mammograms are just two procedures that could prevent major problems and save lives (Messerli, n.d.).