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| Consumer | 66% | 53 votes | Total: 80 votes | |
| Government | 34% | 27 votes |
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Add to FavoritesCompetition is the key to keeping prices low in a free market. Competition also encourages the research and development of new advancements in technology and new formulations for medicine. It is the consumer that has the real power. Merely, by choosing and buying the services, the consumers voice the opinion that have built businesses into great corporations or destroyed them.
Giving control to the government, takes away from the patient and doctor's ability to decide the best course of action for treatment. In the interest of saving money, experimental tests or high cost chemotherapy may be left out. The government may decide it would be cheaper for a person to die than pay for treatment or get an organ transplant.
The government is notorious for spending money in places that have no practical application. Research and development would quickly fall by the wayside as the government would divert the money supposedly for health care to other useless projects. Without new breakthroughs in drug development, cures for diseases stay well out of reach.
The cost of health care alone would throw the government into a huger debt. Already one state is going bankrupt because of it. This would force the government to keep raising the price of health care. In order to combat this, they would lower the salary of hard-working doctors and nurses, driving many away from this profession. Creating a shortage of doctors would increase wait times and the amount of time a doctor can spend with a patient.
Longer lines, predetermined tests, and generalized revolving door health care would affect the consumer greatly. Frustration would turn potentially ill citizens from getting the care they needed. Worse, many might to turn home remedies that may not work or cause more harm then good.
Looking at nationalized health care in other countries show the potential downfalls. Do not be fooled by the appearance that the grass is greener on the other side. It is not. Nationalizing health care would be a step toward a socialist government, which the United States is clearly not.
While it might seem at first that the government-control would lower prices. In the long run, the consumer would actually be paying more for less. Decisions would be made by some politician in Congress, instead of the consumer. Granted, the health care system is not perfect and probably never will be. Putting health care in the hands of the government would be suicide.
Learn more about this author, Tabitha Akery.
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Government
There is a limit to what the market can accomplish. Certain goods and services are of a nature where a free market is just not the best solution and should be in the domain of the government as "public goods". Railways and postal systems are examples. If a postal system were to be driven by market forces, then there would be minimal incentive to deliver letters to vast sections of the land- after all why would a profit making enterprise deliver a letter to Nome, Alaska at the same rate as delivering a letter to NY, NY?
Health care is a similar public good. Consumers are just not in a position to make the right decision in a free market especially given the duplicitous nature of corporations who will do anything in their powers to ensure that the average consumer doesn't have the right kind of information to make a free and informed decision. This has been seen many times already like in the case of the mortgage crisis where ill-informed consumers were convinced by greedy banks and mortgage brokers to take out loans they had no means to repay or as in the dot com boom when investors were suckered into buying stock that had no value based on absurdly high ratings provided by Wall Street firms.
Buying health care is not a trivial task like buying TV's or even a car. It's a complex process with a lifetime impact and has a lot more human component than the TV or car purchase.
Over a period of time, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and profit-minded hospitals have done everything to make health care more and more expensive. There has been insufficient regulation of their activities and really the only agency that can put a stop to this is the government.
Which is why I maintain that state sponsored health care with private options available is the only solution to the crisis afflicting this country, one that is spiralling out of control. It is easy to pick out the faults in the British NHS or Canadian public health systems. It is trivial to find isolated examples of people whose health care was delayed because they were on a waiting list of some kind. But one cannot ignore that the majority of people are well served by this system and more importantly the majority of people don't have to worry about a potential bankruptcy because of a health related issue. The peace of mind that is attendant with knowing that there is an option available for free or low cost health care is invaluable. There is a significant comfort in knowing that one's health care is not decided by insurance company drones whose primary remit is to deny any claim that crosses their desk leaving the onus on the claimant to prove the legitimacy of the claim.
A monetary value cannot be ascribed to these aspects of a government sponsored health system.
Learn more about this author, Anand Mahadevan.
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