Every Child in the US Regardless of Economic Situation Deserves Free Healthcare
The United States’ healthcare system is the cause for much debate, not only as a talking point, but as the main target for actual policy change in the last few decades. We saw Obama introduce the affordable healthcare act in 2010 and now Trump seeks to replace it with an alternative in the future. The country is almost split completely down the middle on healthcare and there is good reason to be, each system has drawbacks and benefits. There really is no system that is 100% efficient. However that being said, I believe that there is one issue that should break party borders and each side should agree with, which is free healthcare plans for every child under 18 that is from a family unable to afford it. Let me explain my reasoning why.
There are about 74 million children under the age of 18 in the United states, roughly accounting for 23% of the population. The vast majority of these children are covered under their parent’s plans with the current system. It is estimated only around 10% or 7.4 million are completely uninsured. Yes if they are sick they probably won’t be turned away, but in most cases, the parents of these children will wait until the situation is bad enough where it becomes much more expensive to treat. Hospitals and clinics would most likely end up saving money if the government covered basic preventative care for these children.
We don’t choose the family we are born into and we especially don’t choose the amount of income they are earning. America is supposed to be the land of opportunity where those with the will to work and the desire to better themselves can make a life for themselves. Giving our future generations every opportunity for success while growing up is crucial. Letting a young child catch an illness that could have been prevented just because their parent’s aren’t able to provide them health care is unacceptable. No matter what economic background they have, children growing up in the United States shouldn’t have to worry about how much it will cost for them to go to the doctor.
If we were talking about providing healthcare to 300 million people, there are many monetary reasons to not provide care, but were talking about roughly 7 million children. Various sites like dataorg calculate that the average cost per person yearly to provide full healthcare would be 6,000-7,000 dollars. Even if we took the high estimate of $7,000, it would ultimately cost around 49 billion dollars. This might sounds like a large amount, but US tax revenue is 6.6 trillion, which would make this plan.007% of money earned via taxes. On top of that the US spent 600 billion on the military in 2015, more than the top next richest nations combined. Perhaps we should be helping our own citizens rather than swinging our military’s big dick around.
For a country with one of the highest GDP per capita rates in the world, there is no reason that even a single child in this country should have to worry about their healthcare. They are the future of this country and we need to give our children every shot at success possible. Until they become of age where they become adults and rely on working, we should offer them any advantage we can. We have the money, there are only excuses why it cant be done.
Thanks to @Elyaque for the badges
As someone from a country with quite decent healthcare laws (The Netherlands, it's not perfect but it works well enough for most), I really don't understand why so many Americans are against social health care. Somehow a lot of people still associate anything social with "communism", which is apparently the devil.
Easy, make it "free" and the wait times/rationing will be astronomical. Not dissing yall over in the Netherlands, but we have over 300 million folks here.
Yes, we have more people, and if the full 300 million population of the US was pushed through a healthcare industry that only had the bandwidth to appropriately handle say, 150 million, then yes things would be backed up and messy quick.
The solution to having more people in the market using the services is to expand the market, not to limit the customers. This whole critique that too many people going to the doctor would be too much for the health care industry to handle makes no sense to me, unless you assume the healthcare industry would remain exactly as it is and not expand in any way to accommodate the increased traffic. But why would that be the case?
All you have to do is look at the VA system. I think the number that currently uses the VA is around 9 million. I very well could be a little off on that number. But, it is bogged down by waste, fraud, and extremely long wait times. Not to mention the travel distance many have to endure. I just don't see a single payer system ever working here.
Yes, the VA system needs more facilities and doctors to properly handle the bandwidth they are expected to deal with. It's like I said above.....if you have 9 million people being funneled through infrastructure and personnel that can only deal with 6 million, you have a problem. The solution is to expand the market, get more personnel and more facilities. That seems like fairly easy common sense to me.
Also, it is worth noting that "single payer" does not mean what the VA is. There is a difference between Single Payer and State run healthcare. It is entirely possible to have a system in which the medical industry remains private, doctors still have their offices, hospitals are still privately owned, nothing at all about the way they hospitals are run changes at all, but the difference is that one entity, the government, the single payer, pays all of the bills. This allows the private industry to continue to run privately, but also allows for one massive negotiator to have the clout to haggle down medical costs, something that quite clearly a nation of individual payers is categorically incapable of doing.
So, you don't think the "single payer" will put caps on salaries or dictate every facet of future care? I don't know, but I have zero faith in the US government of improving much of anything. I mean, the government have run the VA since inception and it it still riddled with these problems.
And I have zero faith in the private sector that runs the medical industry to do anything other continue to raise prices and the private entities that run insurance to continue to raise premiums and, unless specifically forbidden by law, refuse and turn away people with preexisting conditions to go bankrupt or die.
We are in a sea of bad actors here amigo. The health care industry and insurance companies have been pretty much allowed to set their own prices and control its own supply for decades, and that got us where we are now.
But you say if you give a large single payer the ability to negotiate prices that they may abuse that power. And that's true. The government may potentially abuse any power you give it. Clearly the private sector that controls health and insurance now has amplying abused the power it has. And here we are, with the biggest burden of healthcare costs in the modern world, a private sector happy to continue making gobs of money, and a government that folk like you don't trust to help fix it.
So then what do we do?
If you ask me, I have 0 faith that any profit driven business will do anything other than aggressivly seek the highest possible profit. That is what they do. The normal natural check against that is the ability of consumers to simply not consume the product. If the new state of the art 4K TVs are more expensive than people want to pay, not many will sell, until the industry finds a way to lower costs, and then people start buying them. That is how it SHOULD work, those are the free market pressures people are always on about.
The problem is with healthcare there is, and probably can't be, a true free market. The consumers don't have the option to turn away the service, they are captive consumers. When you product means the difference between life and death, people will pay what you ask for. They will sell everything they own and go bankrupt if that's what it takes, cause the only alternative, the remaining option if they refuse your product, is death.
If you ask me, that is the inherent problem with healthcare and why normal free market logic simply does not apply, so non-free market pressures must be brought to play.
You do bring up a very important topic with regards to healthcare/insurance. And, that is pre-existing conditions. It is absurd to use the "insurance" model to cover these folks, imo.
This group of people need to be entirely taken out of the insurance pool all together. It is not "insurance" if you already have made a claim. If you truly want to curb price increases, this must be done. This is where the government should step in. The government should help take care of children, the elderly, and folks with pre-existing conditions.
On another note. Obamacare. What is up with "children" staying on their parents policy from 18-26? Isn't the whole point to make the young/healthy offset the cost of the older/sick? Am I missing something here? That is a huge chunk of change missing from this dismal system. It is amazing to me that the "free market" works for everything except healthcare.
the issue isnt the cost of insurance its the cost of health care, and no it would not expand they limit the number of people that can go to medical school (regardless of grades) so the doctors sort of have a monoply adn there is no way they are going to give that up, what needs to happen is tort law needs to be reformed(unfortunately about 80% of our legislatures are former attorneys , so that aint gonna happen) i think there are 330 million legal citizens in this country and as Rand Paul said we should be able to insure (with o deductible and 0 copay) everyone for about a1.00 a day as opposed to the 1500 a month for a family of 4 and that plan has a 7000 dollar deductible (per person) and a 80/20 split on the insurance, to many politicians too many administrators too many attorneys are getting filthy rich and the rest of the nation has to suffer.
I agree that the cost of insurance is a symptom not the illness, and the problem is that the health care industry is just too damned expensive in this country. The problem is, there really is no way to get a free market entity to voluntarily agree to make less money, there is no way to incentivize a business into being less profitable. There is simply no carrot here, so it'd going to have to be the stick. But as soon as you start using the stick you have droves of people shouting at your that you are a socialist and infringing on the freemarket.
look up the Oklahoma Surgery Center, they post their prices on line and are 10s of thousands of dollars cheaper than the hospitals in the area, it can be done and these are the same surgeons and anesthiologist (i know i spelled it wrong) that work at the major hospitals, there are people from all over the country going to that place for surgeries, one of the main difference is they are self managed and rarely accept insurance.
If they don't or rarely, accept insurance, then I am guessing the vast majority of people can't conceivable afford their services.
I mean if I need a series of surgeries that going to cost say 30k, along with a year of physical therapy and various prescription meds to recover, let's say somwhere in the neighborhood of 40k total cost for the whole shebang....if I am told "Hey, there's this place that will do it for 23k rather than 30k, but they don't take insurance so you have to pay for all of it yourself".....that doesn't really help me. It might as well cost 500K and be done on the moon for all that helps me. I still can't even remotely afford that, and I would have to go with the overall more expensive, but less expensive directly to me, insurance option somewhere else.
The problem is that healthcare just cost too damn much, I would love to live in a world where insurance was only needed for occasional rare catastrophic medical conditions, and that most citizens could pay for most medical expenses out of their own regular income.
That is the world I would like to live in, but that is not the world we occupy. We occupy a world where you have to be pretty damn well off to have even a reasonable shot at affording care out of your own pocket, even at places like the Oklahoma Surgery Center, and the overwhelming majority of people have utterly no hope of affording medical expensive stuff without insurance, making them a neccesity.
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Very simply it is a direct relationship between provider and patient. The patient pays a reasonable monthly fee and then is taken care of by the provider. You will have a personal physician that you can contact anytime by several methods. There are no other financial obligations for the patient. We don’t bill any insurance so we aren’t worried about generating charges the patient may or may not be aware of. There are no office copays.
The practice will offer patients the opportunity for further healthcare savings by offering to pass on our wholesale pricing on prescriptions and labs. These are a service and not profit centers. Time is the biggest commodity gained in DPC by limiting the patient panels. We take care of only about a third the number of patients that are in a traditional practice so less visits and more time per visit.
they are creating a network of free market doctors from every discipline, all the way up to brain surgery and rapidly spreading across the United States, check out the Oklahoma surgery center website
Don’t fall victim to the corollary lie about government regulation
by Surgery Center of Oklahoma | Jun 12, 2017 | Blog
Hello, Dr. Keith Smith with you on behalf of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, thank you for joining me. We’ve reviewed a lie that many of you believe, that government regulations are meant to protect us from corporate abusers. When, I think I’ve made the case and Dr....
Don’t believe the “single-payer system” hype
by Surgery Center of Oklahoma | Jun 9, 2017 | Blog
Hello, Dr. Keith Smith with you here on behalf of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, thank you for joining me. Here’s a lie that many of you believe: single-payer in the United States, a system of that type would result in all the insurance companies being kicked to the... here are some of their blogs.
Because there is only so much resources to go around. Nationalizing doesn't create more. It's the skimpy bikini problem -- tug the resources in one direction and now something else gets uncovered.
i think the idea that someone else can and will take the money you earn and spend it on what they see fit is the issue, i dont know the level of corruption in your country but it is over the top here and everything our government touches turns to shit in a hurry.
I would agree that children need to be protected and the basic needs be provided for them. That being said, their version of healthcare would be counter-productive. They don't provide health, because the system doesn't care. Government needs to be involved in fewer things, not more. A less intrusive way of providing for basic needs would be great, with minimal strings attached. I would like to see that.
Can you describe for me that a system that provided for the basic health and needs of all children but would not require additional government involvement would look like? How might that function in actual reality?
Like it used to. People weren't up in arms then, there was lots of recognized charity care, resources weren't poured down the drain for minimal return, and there were not piles of dead bodies outside of ERs from refusal of care.
The whole Progressive mantra of "refuse care" is code for "medical professionals are uncaring a-holes." It's a caricature of who medical professionals are, an argument that has about as much subtlety as a WWII propaganda poster.
The US used to lead the world in quality of care. So how are we doing as we resort to more and more centralized care? Those stats going up or down?
And yet -- Interventionists continue to argue that the declining health and raging costs are because we just haven't yet centralized enough.
We will get the whole US system to resemble the VA system soon, guys, quit worrying about it.
I don't know what history you are referring to, but when you say "like it used to" the actual real history of healthcare in the western world is that up until quite recently only the rich could afford it and the vast majority of people never saw a doctor in their life and just died when they got too sick for home-remedies to address.
What "like it used to" standard are you referring to? "Modern Medicine" has barely existed for a century, there isn't even that much "like it used to" to even refer back to. This is all quite new historically speaking.
Your assertions are ill-informed presumptions -- not fact.
Middle class and upper class could all afford to see doctors. AMA formed in 1800s because allopaths were losing patients to homeopaths, indicating not only robust market for doctors but also patients with the means and interest in directing their own health care.
The poor often relied on quacks, a fact that distressed the middle and upper class. But the biggest improvement in health came from better sanitation and food. Not access to doctors.
So like I said -- "like it used to."
sigh I love it when someone explains to be that I am ill-informed and then proceeds to go on a long tangent of half truths and whole falsehoods. I have no doubt you think this is true, but it's not, and I wonder if there is much point arguing with you about it.
1: Yes, the "middle class" and the rich could afford to see some sort of person who claimed to be a physician. As you point out, up until modern standards of liscensing and accreditation, a HUGE amount of those "doctors" were homeopaths and other charlatans, not real doctors, so no, the majority of people did NOT get to see doctors as in real medical specialists who could actually help them.
2: The "middle class" and the rich were a very small percentage of the population for most of world history up until quite recently. It is only in the last 70 years or so that the notion of a robust middle class that consisted of a bulk of your population even existed. For most of the western history the largest % of your population were poor working folk, who did not own property, who did not invest, who did not have much if any disposable income. So even if it is true that "the middle class and rich could always afford "doctors"" the middle class and rich were not where near the majority of your population. Most of your popuLatino were below that level and no, could not afford anything like major medical care, prescriptions, operations, care by a specialist, etc etc etc.
So when you say you'd like healthcare to go back to "how it used to be" I must assume you are fancying yourself as being middle class and up in that scenario, becuase I have very little doubt that if you were among the bulk of the population who were poor working class folk, you would NOT like your healthcare accessibility and affordability to be like it was "back then". And good lord, something like preventative care, going to see a doctor just to have them assess you and give you advice on how to improve your health and avoid future complications......freaking unheard of among the vast majority of people until quite recently.
Just because you feel homeopaths or naturopaths are not "real doctors" doesn't mean they aren't. "Real" doctors established licensing systems to protect their livelihoods, not to benefit humanity. Homeopaths were making 4 times what allopaths were making during the 1860s because patients were choosing to go to the homeopaths instead of the allopaths, which again is why the AMA was formed. Is your argument that the whole of humanity is just too stupid to be able to tell when they feel well or feel ill?
Unfortunately, that would put you in the good company of the Progressives, who thought society would fall apart unless the "smart people" told everyone else what to do. They felt it was their duty to protect society from itself, to make society better by making society do it their way. This typical elitist twaddle is the root cause of much of the misery and dysfunction society is struggling through currently. It spawned central banks, the welfare state, the warfare state, prohibition and prohibition part II aka the War on Drugs. Society would have been in a much better spot if only the Progressives had a little more faith in their fellow man. But they look down on their fellow man with an elite disdain -- the Progressives intend to save humanity by making laws and passing regulations just like missionaries intended to save the natives by making them wear pants.
It is not surprising that the homeopaths and "irregular practitioners" were doing so well in the 1800s -- Society isn't stupid and the allopathic profession had little to offer. What they did have was mostly herbal remedies and toxic treatments like mercury. Public opinion of the allopathic profession reached such lows that a prominent national newspaper in 1859 felt justified in calling the entire medical profession a "stupendous humbug."
Perhaps you remember something called "puerperal fever"? It's a uterine infection after childbirth. And until the late 1800s, it was mostly caused by doctors. Doctors, (yes, the same "real doctors" that you were referring to), had no conception of germs. So they would go from patient to patient doing vaginal examinations, interspersed with ungloved autopsies. And thus they spread infections from person to person. The death rate for giving birth in hospital was around 25%, occasionally spiking to 100% when a wave of infection would spread through. The death rate to give birth at home to an "alternative practitioner", those unschooled midwives who had no formal training and no fancy title or degree, was much lower. But I guess those women who chose to not see a doctor for their birth were just stupid and ignorant, right?
Consider how those "real doctors" treated Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847 he started trying out chlorinated lime on his hands and cut the rate of puerperal fever by 90%. So what did the "real doctors" do? They had him committed to a mental institution in 1865, where he died 14 days after admission from being beaten by the guards.
Let's try using a little actual data to consider your impression that "no where near the majority" of people could see doctors. The national medical convention in 1847 estimated that there were 40,000 allopathic practitioners in the nation, along with another 40,000 "irregular" practitioners -- that is one practitioner of medicine for every 250 people. And remember -- these people were all paying for services out of pocket.
Compare that to 2014 US numbers -- 318 million population and 916,264 physicians -- that's one practitioner for every 347 people. So let's think about your claim. Back then, "no where near the majority" according to you were able to see a doctor, yet they managed to sustain a much higher per capita number of practitioners even though everyone was paying out of pocket, as compared to a lower per capita number today, when insurance pays for most visits.
So how on earth did the population sustain that much larger number of per capita practitioners if, as you claim, "no where near the majority", (which I would take to mean "a small minority") of people were actually able to afford it? The reality is that medical care cost a lot less back then. Which was, in part, due to limitations on what they had to offer, but was also in part due to a fairly free market.
See -- this is what happens when you just presume that history and facts are a certain way without actually bothering to research and try to understand where we've been. Your choices and impressions end up riding on a large wave of presumption that is, in large part, politically and ideologically motivated nonsense.
Last post goes to you, and thanks for the discussion!
Oi, naturopath and homeopath? Well that's a pretty good sign that there is nothing further productive to mine from this conversation. Just as I would not have a serious conversation about space travel with someone who believes the earth is flat, would not have a serious discussion about mathematics with someone who thinks the number 0 is Islamic hearsay, I find it extremely unlikely I'm going to have a productive conversation about affordable healthcare with someone who believes in magic diluted water as a feasible healthcare option.
I also agree with you that all children should be covered. However, I think it would be best served by anything other than government. The US government has a tendency to make anything it touches worse. There has to be a private solution to this. Great post btw!
Like what? Care to spin a hypothetical or example?
I really don't know. Maybe something like doctors and other professional medical types get together and figure out the best private way forward. Get a little help from the multitude of US humanitarian organizations to help with funding. I would be the last person to give a viable option as I know next to nothing about this sector. I know it can be done. We can do anything, right?
Maybe add a small voluntary monthly insurance charge to help fund. I think the governments' role in all of this is to bring down the costs however they can. Why are medical costs so damn high in this country?
It truly is ridiculous. They don't seem very interested in doing this though.
i absolutely agree with this. i can not fathom how anyone could disagree. i wish i could upvote and resteem this a thousand times.
i prefer to take care of my own children, and it is getting harder and harder the more the gov involves itself in our lives, we are supposed to be free men that comes with benefits and responsibilitys unfortunately too many people want the benefits but not the responsibility.
Use free market principals to solve this issue. I don't advocate Government interference in anything including healthcare.
Generally, I'm in agreement. However, I'm not sure medicine is a good place to have profit motive involved. The kind of abuse I'm willing to take from corporations on most other products, such as internet, cell phone service, Coinbase, Ebay....you name it...sounds horrifying in the medical context.
Isn't the profit motive what leads to falling prices, technological innovation and better quality? Certainly wouldn't want that in healthcare....
Sometimes. Surely you don't think today's corporations are "passing the savings on to the consumer?"
Saw IV (an unlikely citation) covers a little bit of what I mean with the insurance adjuster. My point is only, profit motive leads to prioritizing profit, not positive results. They aren't always the same thing.
I don't really need McNeedles Corp deciding it's in their shareholders best interest to simply disinfect and re-use needles, for example.
I would put corporations and free market in different baskets. I agree that corporations are a major part of today's business world, but that is why today's world is so messed up. Corporations exist to shield market participants from the consequences of their actions. That is their sole purpose. From a systems perspective, that equates to severing a feedback loop, which never ends well.
Totally in agreement. A free market without the stranglehold of corporations would result in a totally different look at the initial question in Caliber's post.
And you notice, corporations get that special perk through a partnership with government, who protects their right to keep profits but then dump the losses on the public. It's a symbiotic relationship -- corporations get a one way valve for profits, and government gets to point to the abuses (which they have allowed) as a reason for why their existence is necessary.
Can you give an example of how you imagine a free market solution to healthcare working? As far as I know any truly freemarket healthcare model would allow and permit refusal of service to, and therefore the death of, non-profitable patients who either couldn't pay or were too ill to insure with any reasonable expectation of profit.
But of course if you know of a freemarket model not like that, I would love to hear you pitch it.
The secret is in the use of AI/Robotics/Blockchain/Cryptocurrency. But I'm not giving away all my secrets....not yet at least. There is a better way though.
open up the medical schools, remove about half of the administrators and change tort law, really not that difficult if you ask me.
But the healthcare industy in the US is incredibly expensive top to bottom. Yes, out Doctors do get paid more than most other countries, but out supplies, procedures, equipment, medicine, it all costs more, a LOT more, than pretty much everywhere else. I agree doctor's inflating their own price is part of the pie, but not at all the biggest part, a relatively small piece really by my assessment. So if we increased the number of doctors, and that drove down the price the doctor's themselves are actually paid for their services by a national average of say, 15%, that would still come no where near making healthcare affordable and accessible for the average person.
Not to mention any such measures taken by government to force the medical industry to allow more doctors, to produce more product let's say, than the industry wants to....that would actually be an infringement on the free market would it not?
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not neccesarily, it would simply create competition, and in doing so the most well run ,capable, and reasonably priced offices would eventually settle the market, umira is an injectable medication used to treat multiple autoimmune diseases ranging from rheumatoid arthritis to psoriasis to ulcerative colitis — and it’s one of the best-selling drugs in American history. In 2014 alone, millions of Americans spent a combined $6.5 billion on Humira prescriptions.
But we probably didn’t have to. While Americans paid an average price of $2,669 for Humira, the Swiss were able to buy the exact same drug for $822 — and in the United Kingdom, patients got it for $1,362. If the United States paid what the Swiss paid for the arthritis drug, we would have spent $2 billion on Humira in 2014 rather than $6.5 billion.
There’s nothing different about the Humira that we bought in the United States and the drug the Swiss bought – except that in the United States, we’re terrible at negotiating a good deal on pretty much any medical service.
“It’s exactly the same product, but, in terms of the American patient, you’re just paying double or more the price for no more health gain,” says Tom Sackville, chief executive of the International Federation of Health Plans.
Every two years, his group publishes a report that compares health care prices in different countries. And it shows that Humira isn’t some weird anomaly; nearly every procedure or drug costs way more in the United States. See for yourself in these charts:
nice post ,,, you have good blog , Good luck. Comrade
Sad, but nice post
I'd say every human, not just every child.
I am not sure what the solution is, but I have a feeling that either way its going to cost me steem at some point.
The right to healthcare should not be linked to the size of your wallet. I agree with most of the comments here - I find it difficult to understand why so many Americans are against it...
Upvoting
So what responsibility would be linked to that right to keep it stable?
Instead of cutting jobs in education, health etc. and making riches richer and poor poorer, every single government should ensure the wealth of the country is distributed in such a way that everyone ours have access to health and social services, education.
Again, what responsibility would there be on the part of those using those services -- that free healthcare, social services, and education -- that would keep the whole thing stable and balanced?
Slowly change people's mentality not to take advantage of "free" services:
I am no economist but these are pretty basic ideas that can easily be applied. Do you need to invest money for campaigns? Of course, but like anything else if you do not invest it is difficult to see progress