Common Healthcare Debate Objections and Responses

[Axis Kast]

Lately, I've been debating health care reform with a number of friends and coworkers. I'm going to offer some of the typical arguments made in opposition to universal care, and some of the analyses made of the reasons that the United States has been unable to keep costs down. I was wondering if anybody on this board has some good, evidence-based responses. I'll try to indicate my typical rebuttals, too.

Analysis: The reason that healthcare costs in the United States have risen so steeply in the past fifty years is due primarily to (1) a sharp risk in the number of unskilled workers whose employers do not find it economical to provide benefits as part of a compensation package; (2) rapid advances in the quality of care; (3) increased life expectancy for persons suffering from afflictions once considered practically untreatable, resulting in subsequent interventions of increasing complexity and cost to maintain quality of life.

Objection: The quality of health care available elsewhere in the Western world is equivalent to what is available in the United States, but costs far less per capita. Clearly, the "ever-improving quality of care over time" is insufficient to explain the problem.

Claim: A significant proportion of the uninsured in the United States are illegal immigrants. If the rolls of uninsured did not include this population, the scope (and therefore urgency) of the problem would be far smaller.

Claim: Adding more than 40 million Americans to the healthcare rolls will cause a spike in the demand for health services that forces rationing, reducing the overall quality of medical care in the United States for those who do not receive entitlements, and resulting in (1) denial of access; (2) lengthy waiting periods during which sufferers' problems will only compound; (3) an increase in the number of incidents of malpractice by overworked health professionals; (4) the practical implementation of literal "death panels" to determine which patients are most deserving of the limited resources available to hospital staff.

Claim: In an effort to drive down costs, countries that implement universal coverage impose lengthy waiting times for non-critical access. Appointments with a medical professional must be made months in advance, especially for diagnoses by specialists and "routine" dental interventions such as the removal of spoiled teeth, which may be causing considerable pain the interim.

Claim: Universal health care will eventually lead to government assignment of doctors, who may be incompetent or make the patient uncomfortable. The alternative to seeing a doctor outside assignment will be to wait inordinate amounts of time, which may be unreasonable, and therefore effectively impossible, barring an emergency.