I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you people have to say about reforming the health care industry. I have mixed feelings about universal healthcare, and I think that a discussion of ideas would do me some good.
My feelings:
- Our current health care system is obviously flawed. Healing sicknesses has becoming a billion-dollar industry. Insurance companies exist to actually deny people health care in order to save money.
- John McCain's plan doesn't do anything at all. A tax incentive to allow more people to buy health care doesn't fix the system, it just lassos more people into the system so they can get screwed.
On the other hand:
- I have first-hand experience with the cons of universal health care. When vacationing in Canada with my family for a few weeks, I got very sick and my face swelled up like a balloon. We went to a hospital there and waited 8 hours to see a doctor for what couldn't have been more than 5 minutes. Next to us, no lie, was a man with a broken leg, who waited the entire time we waited without having his leg set or anything.
- I'm sure there are hospitals that DON'T have massive amounts of waiting, but the fact is, there is a decent amount. When the government is put in charge of health care, they're running a service with a limited amount of supply and an unlimited amount of demand. So, logically, there's going to be waiting, lots of it.
- Not many countries that I know of have found any way to pay for it without incurring massive debt. France has the best health care system in the world, but they're in billions of dollars of debt because they can't afford the unlimited amount of demand for health care.
My conclusion:
- Universal health care is better than our current system, but not by any means a perfect or even a very good system. Socialized institutions in the US have ended up doing very well (firefighters and libraries) to decent (public schools and postal service) to terrible (DMVs), so there's really no telling how well-managed this system would be. The fact is, though, that we're the only civilized nation in the West to not have a universal health care system of some sort, and that's saying something. Too many people are abused by greedy insurance companies. Still, I don't think that the current idea of universal health care as it's implemented in Canada, France, the UK, etc., is the best way to deal with the health care industry.
Now, I'd like to hear constructive criticism about what I think in order to further the debate about this issue and help me better form my own argument and correct myself if I'm mistaken.