by Chris Shamati

Created on: September 28, 2009   Last Updated: October 06, 2009

This is from an essay I wrote last year in English class.

In a recent survey by the US Health and Human Services, more than 15% of Americans will be without health care in 2008. This astounding number of people brings to us the perennial question: "should the government pay for a universal health care plan that includes everyone or should individuals have to worry about not having health care for themselves?" A plan of this scale would require a massive overhaul of the government's infrastructure and would cause internal turmoil as the economy would falter and taxes would soar. In fact no matter how good this plan would look, the consequences are too grave and would damage the country's economy, making sponsored health care inadvisable and bad for the long term.

It is true that in 2006, 43.6 million Americans lacked health insurance coverage and were therefore, at the mercy of illnesses and injuries. As appalling as the number of uninsured sounds, it has continued to increase over the years, and more and more Americans feel that it is the governments' job to make sure everyone gets access to health care. If the government were to offer this universal health care it would help promote preventative medical treatment as people would no longer have to pay to meet with their doctor, a major factor that previously kept people from getting checkups. This would also eliminate all of the hassle that doctors have to go through in order to figure out insurance policies which ultimately means more paperwork for them and less time helping patients that need it.

However, if the government did in fact do this many people fail to recognize the full implications of a universal health care system. In a recent article by Michael Cannon, it is cited that if the government were to consider offering health care to all, it would cost at the bare minimum, $120 billion dollars annually. That would equate to $550 a year for every adult over the age of 17.Other sources, claim that health care will need at least 2 trillion dollars to be implemented successfully, not to even mention all of the people who will have worse health care or lose it all together under Barack's plan. The reason that some plans would worsen or be lost altogether is because the rich, who used to have higher end plans, would now have the exact same, lower cost plan as everyone else, and would not receive a treatment that they used to get while paying the previous health care premium. The radical changes would not

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