If we look at the reality, those uninsured Americans hardly go without medical care if they need it badly enough since there are nonprofit organizations, flanked by government hospitals that tend to those who are not insured when they are in dire strait. At the same time, it is illegal to refuse giving emergency medical care even if a patient does not have insurance coverage.
When that happens those who are giving the medical service free will have to find a way to cover their cost and one way to do that is to raise the price they charge for medical treatment and they will pass it on to the insurance companies. The insurance companies will do the same and will charge more in premiums as well as monthly payments. This means it is possible to spread the cost, more or less, across the board and everyone involved would share the cost without involving the government.
There is always something different about how the private sector functions because of its being driven by the profit motive and when that is missing from the picture, it might affect both in the doctors and patients flexibility because of governmental policies that will dictate how things should be done and could be unnecessarily strict whereas even if the insurance companies have similar procedures, there is fear it will be worse when it is the government that is making policies.
When taxpayers are going to foot the bill it is possible that those who are doing things right and take care of their health will have to pay for those who are reckless with their health, but when an insurance is involved either they will pay the coverage from their own pocket or if they are not insured they would endure the inconvenience that occurs, at the same time it could cost them their health permanently or they could lose their life.
Whenever a decision to go universal would be reached, there will be a whole industry that would suffer because the insurance industry for sure will be hard hit, and the same goes with the doctors whose lucrative income from the private sector would disappear. That is without mentioning what will be involved at the time of the transition where a lot of paperwork is going to be involved where every citizen will have to go through a new procedure, creating a chaos that could take years to stabilize.
Eventually, since it is going to be a universal right where the cost will have to be covered solely from what the government raises in a form of tax, when there is a deficit and falling behind in balancing the budget, like the rest of the debt the government owes it will be transferred to the next generation.
Therefore, the best solution to this problem would be to leave the health care system intact, because it seems it is much easier to stretch the range the Medicaid is covering currently and add the extra 45 million Americans who are not insured into the Medicaid program by working out some kind of a system and leave the rest whose number is obviously huge who are getting the coverage from their employers to continue to do so.
The employers have various mechanisms to involve the employees to participate in the program like making the employees pay a certain portion of the coverage or by introducing deductibles that will help in sharing and cushioning the cost of the employers. It might be much better if they curtail some of the future benefits for the employees such as salary increase instead of passing it to the government that has no other means of covering the cost except raising taxes that would definitely affect the economy inadvertently.
It is a known fact how the government runs its business as it is always possible to run a deficit because, most of the time, depending on what is involved the tax money is not enough to cover the expenditure. This means leaving the health care system as it is, is beneficial for everyone involved and it is a relatively smaller portion of the population that is finding it difficult to cop with the spiraling cost and absorbing them into an existing well functioning system like Medicaid is much easier.
There is concern about small businesses that will find it difficult to cover their employees and the coverage could be made affordable for them by creating a pool where all small businesses will put in money for group coverage that will deal with the basic medical needs and when that is not enough, there are methods like HSA that had been touched on that could be used as a tool to avail the badly need medical care for those who need it.
Moreover, the new introduction that is dubbed as employers responsibility legislation could also be another solution where employers will be asked to pay a mandatory fee if they are not in a position to offer insurance coverage for their employers and the government, hand-in-hand, with other entities could come up with various packages that will be tailor made to meet everyone’s need.
1. Health Care. Whitehouse. gov. Retrieved from the Web on November 12, 2006. www. whitehouse. gov/infocus/healthcare/ 2. The Case for Universal Health Care in the USA. Connecticut Coalition for Health Care. Retrieved from the Web on November 12, 2006. http://cthealth. server101. com/ the_case_for_the_universal_health_in_the_united_states. htm. 3. Laying the Ground Work for Universal Health Coverage. The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved from the Web on November 12, 2006. www. heritage. org/Research/Healthcare/test031003. cfm.