I recently received a comment on my latest blog filled with a lot of concerns about health care from an anonymous viewer. So let us jump straight into each concern and address each one. The first concern that the viewer had was long waits in the waiting rooms of hospitals. First of all let me start off by saying that, for the uninsured, there already is a long waiting list that could inevitably lead to death for that person. Also to state that there are not already long waiting lists is being completely unrealistic. For some Americans it takes months just to be able to see a specialist, or primary care physician. Waiting lists in other industrialized countries are virtually non-existent except for elective surgeries and procedures. “No country has a waiting list for emergency procedures, and virtually no country has waiting lists for primary care visits.”
The next concern that was stated in the response deals with the decreased amount of physicians due to a decrease quality of care. It is important for Americans to realize that quality of care depends on a number of different issues. These issues include systems design, provider competency and supply, funding, etc. Quality of care is in terrible condition with the current system that America has because of a lack of heath care access. “If patients can’t afford their medications, if patients wait until they are very sick until they go to the ER-quality decreases.” When one looks at it from this perspective the quality of care will actually increase under a universal health care system instead of decrease. “Any rational designer of a UHC (Universal Health Care) system would insure appropriate funding of the system and would also strive to strike the right balance between overutilization and underutilization of health care services so that waiting lists would be minimized.”
Thirdly, the anonymous viewer was worried about people not wanting to go to college long enough due to apathy toward the system. Actually, the truth is that countries that possess universal health care have had most of the major medical breakthroughs in research. It is also important to realize that many doctors may actually see their “autonomy” increased under a particular form of universal health care. Physician’s salaries would also stay the same. There is nothing in the universal health care agreement that says that a doctor’s salary will decrease. Doctor’s also do not benefit from the current system. Many Americans cannot afford current prescriptions as it is, and of course we all know that 47 million American citizens are uninsured. People are dying daily because we, the taxpayers, are supporting a war that should have never been authorized rather than universal health care.
As my “Understanding Politics” college textbook states, “Third, during the course of this war, the Bush administration switched enemies and changed the rationale for fighting. The real enemy was a secretive organization known as al Qaeda, rather than another state. To the extent that this enemy had a face, it was the face of Osama bin Laden. For all its military might, the United States was unable to defeat al Qaeda by invading Afghanistan and even failed to apprehend bin Laden himself, who remains at large some 4 years later as these words are written. Instead, the Bush administration shifted the focus of attention from Afghanistan and bin Laden to Iraq and Saddam-in other words, from an elusive enemy that could not be defeated militarily to one that could, or so the architects of the Iraq war believed. That belief has proven false, as was the evidence that Saddam harbored WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), which had been the reason given for launching the war in the first place. As the fighting dragged on and the death toll mounted, the Bush administration changed the rationale for the war once again. Clearly the original rationale- to locate and destroy Saddam’s WMD labs and stockpiles-disappeared when no such weapons were discovered. The reason for ousting Saddam then became nation-building, to promote freedom and democracy in the world. Later, as the civil war raged, the reason was simply to stabilize the region because a hasty withdrawal would, it was argued, leave a dangerous power vacuum. What no one in Washington was saying, however, was what nearly everyone outside Washington was thinking all along: that the real reason for invading and occupying Iraq was oil, which is still the world’s most important strategic resource.”
These are the issues that one of my viewers brought up. I would like to thank the viewer for their concerns, and I feel that I have answered those quite adequately. I will give the site and book references that I used, as always, just below the article. I used the American Medical Student Association’s website for my pro-universal health care arguments. They are very pro-universal health care. I would encourage you to go to both sites that I list below to learn more, and answer any questions that you may have. I also, as stated in the paragraph above, used my Government and World Affairs college course textbook “Understanding Politics” for my “War on Terror” information.
Websites:
The Arguments for Universal Health Care by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA):
http://amsa.org/uhc/uhc_counterarguments.pdf
American Medical Student Association for Universal Health Care Site:
http://amsa.org/uhc/uhcres.cfm
Books:
“Understanding Politics: Ideas, Institutions, and Issues” Eighth Edition
By: Thomas M. Magstadt
(I used pg. 567 paragraphs 2 and 3)
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