The Right to Health Care Without Health Insurance
Insurance is the most worrying issue concerning insurance due to the significant number of uninsured or underinsured Americans. Without comprehensive insurance, individuals face major financial risks if they should become seriously ill or injured. Some services cannot be provided by hospitals unless someone has a comprehensive insurance cover. This has led some people to propose that all citizens should have the right to health care whether or not they have health insurance.
In my opinion, such a solution would only lead to more troubles for our country’s health care system. Great inefficiencies would occur if everybody was guaranteed health care services. This is because the number of people seeking medical aid would increase rapidly. The health care resources we have available would not be able to cope with this increase, and higher inefficiencies would be witnessed.
The US is a large country with a significant population, and there are economic constraints to providing universal health care to everyone, including the uninsured. We live in a capitalistic society where people are expected to pay for the goods and services that they receive. Health care is also a service and a material good that is offered to society. Making health care a right for all is a socialist approach that would be detrimental to the economic prosperity of our nations. People should therefore expect to pay for this product in the same manner that they would expect to pay for a car or for their rent.
From the discussions offered, it is clear that a right to health care would not be the best solution. A better alternative is the public insurance option which would help deal with this problem since it would provide universal coverage but also require everybody to pay a small premium. Such a scheme will result in a drastic reduction in the number of uninsured people in the US. Another alternative would be for the government to position itself as a regulator of prices in the health insurance industry. By enforcing price control, the price of medical costs will decrease by up to 30%, and the insurance firms will not be able to exploit the citizens since they will be accountable to the government.