Universal Healthcare Con, Quantity vs. Quality Essay Example

Universal Healthcare Con, Quantity vs. Quality Essay Example Universal Healthcare Con, Quantity vs. Quality Essay Universal Healthcare Con, Quantity vs. Quality Essay Healthcare needs to stay in the realm of the free market system. If not it will become like any other widely distributed good. It is a simple rule of quality supply vs. demand. If the supply of healthcare services goes up in quantity, the quality of healthcare services will go down. In this country we are able to pay for what we can afford and the free market allows us to pay for the best possible service, if we have the means to do so. For example if a person needed to get their taxes done, they could pay a minimal nominal fee and go a place like Hamp;R Block and get it done cheap, and perhaps have many expenses that the inexpensive, yet low quality tax accountant missed and end up owing the IRS more money than they needed be in the first place. The inverse to this would be to pay a high priced independent CPA and get as many tax deductions, make sure that they are filling the taxes correctly. Similarly if a person gets into legal trouble, they are entitled to a public defender, but in most cases if someone can afford to pay for a high priced, high powered and established attorney they will do so over the free government issued resource. If healthcare reform is taking away our right to choose, and is taking healthcare out of the free market scenario, than we will be left with the general, unsharpened commodity that no one really wants in the first place. Healthcare is expensive for a reason, because in America we are able to get the best technological services, the best expertise in specializations from our physicians and our physicians come from the best medical schools in the world, which are in turn American schools. Compare this to what we see in other countries with socialized healthcare. â€Å"The British government says that, at any one time, there are about a million people waiting to get into hospitals. According to the Fraser Institute, almost 900,000 Canadian patients are on the waiting list at any point in time. And, according to the New Zealand government, 90,000 people are on the waiting lists there. † (Goodman, 2005) New Zealand is a country the size of California yet has more sheep than people living on it and has this problem, what will the United States with a population of over 300 million be faced with? While everyone has universal access, they have to wait a long time in order to see a doctor, if a person can choose to have a heart surgery in a week, and that surgery could significantly increase the chances of survival for that individual, then why would a government choose to take that right away? With Universal Healthcare the same person waiting for heart surgery will have to wait months, perhaps longer because everyone in the system, every citizen is entitled to the same services. So that person who could pay for that surgery and had the means and the willingness to get it done soon, now has to wait on a list with everyone else with the same heart condition in a perpetual line to have his life saved. The flip side of this is that as the government sees these long lines whether they be actual lines or simply a list written on a paper in a database, that the government may try to ration healthcare in order to resolve the wait problem that will be induced by socialized healthcare. Republican New Gingrich recently expressed concern over President Obama’s healthcare reform plan and how it called for the expand of control for government over healthcare; he referred to this as a form of healthcare rationing. He saw that with the influence of these rising f actors that rationing would explicitly be imposed on the elderly. (Gingrich , 2009) We do not want to government to step into our free market economy with our services this way. Whether it be for health services or any other choice that we have the means to have control over as we see fit. Socialized healthcare is a socialized system. Socialism is not capitalism, it is not the free market that the American economy is built on. The government should not increase the quantity of healthcare as it will diminish the quality, whether by the sheer volume and the over saturation of consumers into the market, or whether by curtailing that effect. Healthcare needs to be left as is, as a free market commodity. Bibliography Goodman, John. (2005). Five myths of socialized medicine. Catos Letter, 3(1), Retrieved from cato. org/pubs/catosletter/catosletterv3n1. pdf doi: Cato Institute Gingrich, Newt. (2009). Healthcare rationing: real scary. Center for health transformation, Retrieved from healthtransformation. net/cs/home