Why “Free” Healthcare is Impractically Expensive

Due to rapid inflation in the medical sector and an increasing amount uninsured Americans, healthcare has become a critical issue in American politics. Many prominent members of the Democratic party have proposed the idea of “free” universal single payer healthcare to solve this problem by having the government pay all healthcare cost and having socialized medicine. Although universal healthcare sounds like a good idea in theory, the United States should not implement universal healthcare because of its enormous costs, its reduction of the quality of care, and restrictions of civil liberties and instead need to the use the free market to reduce the costs of healthcare.

The first inherent problem with socialized medicine is the tremendous cost it adds to the government and its citizens. “Free” healthcare in reality is not free and healthcare would just be paid as taxes instead of insurance premiums. Socialized medicine would increase the government budget by hundreds of billions of dollars a year which would lead to large tax increases that would lead to taxation rates reaching fifty percent of one’s income as in Western European nations. Adding another entitlement program also creates larger budget deficits which the government simply cannot afford. The combination of restricting individuals’ disposable incomes and printing more money to pay for healthcare will create economic disaster through mass inflation and reduced consumption spending due to new taxes. Proponents of universal healthcare argue that if we can afford a war in Iraq, than the government can afford to cover all Americans. The government cannot afford the War in Iraq while even with the war defense spending ins only seven percent of the government budget versus the forty percent of the federal government budget used on entitlement benefits adding healthcare to that would only worsen the current financial problems affiliated with the federal government.

Establishing universal healthcare also inevitably reduces the quality of healthcare. In countries such as Canada, England and France where universal healthcare exists the quality of care has decreased significantly. First, the governments give a set pay to doctors, despite the quality of their work, which is considerably less than doctors earn in America, and therefore less people would be willing to invest the time and money to go to medical school since the payoff decreases. As a result the best qualified people for medicine will instead defect to other profession as what already happens in the teaching profession in our public schools. Also, like other government programs, such as the DMV, government healthcare can never run as efficiently as the private sector. In Canada, patients have to wait in a waitlist for up to six months to for a doctors appointment and as long as three weeks to wait to get into emergency rooms. Due to this government red tape and bureaucracies slowing down the medical industry, many Canadians unnecessarily die or go to the United States for quicker treatment. As a result the United States is the only country left in the developed world that has immediate treatment. Universal healthcare also eliminates competition in the pharmaceutical industry. Since the motivation for profit is taken away form medical companies, the incentive to invent new and better medicine to cure more diseases will be taken away.

Therefore technological progress in medicine and biotech will stagnate. Overall, if government takes over healthcare like any other government institution, healthcare will deteriorate in quality and efficiently.

So if universal healthcare cannot solve our healthcare problem the best way, then what can? The best way to solve the healthcare crisis is to fully privatize the medical industry and eliminate government ties with Big Pharma. Steps towards this would be to legalize the purchasing of cheaper drugs from Canada, eliminate subsidies to drug companies, and require modernization of health record keeping for the digital economy. By eliminating government intervention from the medical industry, companies will have to lower cost and premiums to compete for customers. Even countries with healthcare such as Sweden and England are starting to reform their policy to transition back to free market based healthcare. Another way would be to use community care plans that give an individual who buys their own care to pay the same price per individual as a business owner does for a group of employees. Overall, in the spirit of American progress, capitalism and using a truly free market will solve the healthcare issues in the United States.