U. S is one of the major industrialized countries that do not offer universal health care. The government only provides care to a tune of 27%, which compromise the elderly, disabled, children and the poor. This kind of arrangement has seen many people’s inaccessibility to health care services. Most people still lack health insurance and have to use the ‘out of pocket’ approach in funding for their services, which deems expensive and discouraging. Health care should be a basic human right and people should not be denied on the basis of inability to pay.
The federal government should work to benefit all her citizens by committing itself to ensure equality, liberty and pursuit for happiness. It should be committed towards ensuring that her citizens access necessary social services according to UN’s universal declaration of human rights. According to the UN all people regardless of their gender have the right to the highest attainable standard of mental and physical health care. Health care in the United States should be universal and all members of the society should receive health care regardless of their status.
(http://www. unhchr. ch/udhr/lang/eng. htm) The economy of the country would benefit if health care was made universal. The current measures taken leaves approximately 40 million without health care insurance with others underinsured. They suffer drastically from the illnesses and they attain little or no treatment at all. Such people feel left out by the same society they are apart of. A heating nation is a wealthy nation and so without appropriate accessibility to health care the human capital is negatively affected.
The current system spends more than 10% of its GNP on health and still has a very high number of people without proper access to heath. High health costs discourage investment, as people will tend to locate their premises in areas that costs are reduced to increase their profit margins. For instance a manufacturing plant would consider locating its plant in Canada where the health costs it has to pay for its employees would be reduced. Reduced costs leads to more profits for the firm. (Place, 2005)
To avoid liabilities some doctors deny the sicker people the opportunity to access health care by picking the healthier ones. Those who would have benefited from health insurance are those denied the same opportunity due to profit motives of private companies. The minority group suffers most as in most cases they lack good jobs that do not provide employer based coverage. They lack proper transportation facilities to enable easy accessibility to health facilities or to job places make the situation worse for them.
Preventable illness increase due to delayed access to health care the diseases worsen due to lack of early intervention. Provision of Medicaid does not efficiently assist all of them as it is restrictive to mothers, the pregnant and the disabled. (Cook, 2004). What about the rest of people in the minority group? Low paying jobs lead prohibition access to Medicaid and such people have to rely on welfare translating to higher taxes and insurance payments of the able people. (Brown, 2005).