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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

These words in the Declaration of Independence define the "rights" of American citizens. They do not include health care. Yet for over 100 years, some Americans have believed that health care is not only a right, but that the government should provide it and taxpayers should pay for it.

If medical treatment is a right, than what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that your neighbors, through the government, are obligated to provide all health care for you? Does it mean that anyone can demand the government to pay for hospitalization, for prescription drugs, and for specialty treatments such as organ transplants? Does it mean that every American has a right to the skill and knowledge of all physicians and providers?

These questions lead to other questions. How does society pay for health care for all? Who gets to decide who should receive health care and how much? Who gets to decide what the health care budget should be? Who should have the power to make health care decisions for us?

Or rather than confront these issues, do proponents of health care as a right mean everyone should have health insurance? The problem with this belief is that simply having health insurance does not guarantee timely access to actual medical care. Every citizen of Canada has government-paid health insurance, but the long wait times for treatment, most notably for specialty care, would be unacceptable for Americans.

Everyone can agree that health care is a necessity of life. So are food, shelter, and clothing. Yet no one is demanding universal "food care" or universal government housing. The critical issue is that people expect access to food, shelter, and clothing. Americans expect choices and competition when they shop for these necessities of life.

The government exists to guarantee free-markets for Americans when they seek access to virtually any product, but especially access to food, shelter, and clothing. No one would expect society, through government, to pay for these necessities of life for everyone.

If "food care" was controlled, paid for, and regulated by the government, we would have overutilization, fewer choices, and a limited supply. The private system of grocery stores and supermarkets guarantees access, choice, and competitive prices for everyone. The free-market system is efficient, voluntary, and fair.

The critical point is utilizing the best mechanism to allow the greatest number of Americans access to health care. The Canadian single-payer system does not guarantee timely access. The American experience with the Veterans Administration hospital system, a comprehensive government-controlled, single-payer health care program, reveals unacceptable wait times and huge inefficiencies. Fundamentally, these systems ration health care by waiting lists and limited money. The quality of care can be variable.

Because of budgetary constraints, the demand for health care is much greater than the supply in virtually every county with a government-controlled health care system. Even Medicare, essentially a single-payer plan, is not financially sustainable.

Just like in all other economic activities, the free-market offers the best solution to provide the greatest access to health care and to control costs. People freely making their own health care decisions and using their own health care dollars would give Americans the best chance to utilize their "right" to access health care, with safety-net health programs provided for those who can't afford it.

At the end of the day, health care is an economic activity like any other, albeit with the most personal of interactions between patient and provider. Society should work toward putting patients in charge of their health care, reducing the role of government, and focusing on access, not health care as a supposed "right."
Roger Stark, a physician, is the policy analyst for Washington Policy Center's Center for Health Care.
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These words in the Declaration of Independence define the "rights" of American citizens.

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In the debate over health care, we still have not answered the basic question: Should everyone receive at least basic health care? All industrialized nations other than the United States provide healthcare to everyone. Economists state providing health care is good public policy. Getting our nation healthy will create better resilience. Providing basic health care is the humane thing to do, and in the long run, it will be cost effective. There are so many reasons why we need health care reform.

Many people are against the Affordable Care Act. Certainly it is not perfect. But it is a start to fix a very big problem in this country.

Just how big a problem is illustrated by a compelling first-hand account a St. Augustine, Fla. physician wrote for the Florida Times-Union today. I urge you to read his full post here, but the upshot of this M.D.'s story is that an unemployed, uninsured 48-year-old man walked into the urgent-care facility where he works complaining of sudden back pain.

The physician/author suspected the pain could be the result of a life-threatening obstructed aorta and sent him to the hospital for an MRI. After the MRI confirmed a large blood clot in his aorta, the hospital discharged him without operating because the man was uninsured and couldn't pay. Fortunately, this patient's family took him to another hospital which did perform the needed surgery, saving his ability to continue a productive life.

This story illustrates multiple issues with our healthcare system. Here are only a few:

Lack of access to primary care

Inefficiency in addressing a serious problem

Waste from multiple visits and uncoordinated care

Ethical challenges - our duty in medicine is to heal, and the first hospital decided to not take ownership of that concept.

The ACA would mitigate this significantly.

In Florida, this patient would eventually qualify for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, but Florida refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Also, right now, the hospital that treats this patient receives what is know as DSH payments for providing care for the uninsured. Under the ACA, DSH payments will go away, because supposedly everyone will be insured. So in the states without Medicaid expansion, the hospitals that take care of uninsured cases will suffer greatly. They will not get paid anything to save this man's life. What a shame.

For those of you who are against healthcare reform, please share the system you would create to save this man's life. I want to know your answers. Let the comments begin...

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A Great Example Of Why Everyone Should Have Health Coverage

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Don't like Obamacare? What's your alternative? Anti-Obamacare protesters demonstrating in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in June. (Getty Images via @daylife) In the debate over health care, we still have not answered the basic question: Should everyone receive at least basic health care? All industrialized nations other than the [...]

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Is The Government Responsible For Health Care?

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As part of the Intelligence Squared U.S. series, six experts debate the proposition “Universal health care should be the federal government’s responsibility.”

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Let's be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should. This is six times the number who died at the tragedy of 9/11 - but this occurs every year.

In the midst of this horrendous lack of coverage, the U.S. spends far more per capita on health care than any other nation - and health care costs continue to soar. At $2.4 trillion dollars, and 18 percent of our GDP, the skyrocketing cost of health care in this country is unsustainable both from a personal and macro-economic perspective.

At the individual level, the average American spends about $7,900 per year on health care. Despite that huge outlay, a recent study found that medical problems contributed to 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007. From a business perspective, General Motors spends more on health care per automobile than on steel while small business owners are forced to divert hard-earned profits into health coverage for their employees - rather than new business investments. And, because of rising costs, many businesses are cutting back drastically on their level of health care coverage or are doing away with it entirely.

Further, despite the fact that we spend almost twice as much per person on health care as any other country, our health care outcomes lag behind many other nations. We get poor value for what we spend. According to the World Health Organization the United States ranks 37th in terms of health system performance and we are far behind many other countries in terms of such important indices as infant mortality, life expectancy and preventable deaths.

As the health care debate heats up in Washington, we as a nation have to answer two very fundamental questions. First, should all Americans be entitled to health care as a right and not a privilege - which is the way every other major country treats health care and the way we respond to such other basic needs as education, police and fire protection? Second, if we are to provide quality health care to all, how do we accomplish that in the most cost-effective way possible?

I think the answer to the first question is pretty clear, and one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president. Most Americans do believe that all of us should have health care coverage, and that nobody should be left out of the system. The real debate is how we accomplish that goal in an affordable and sustainable way. In that regard, I think the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of health care in our country and move toward a publicly-funded, single-payer Medicare for All approach.

Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated and bureaucratic in the world. Its function is not to provide quality health care for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible (30 percent) of each health care dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid and the VA are administered for far less.

In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary health care doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in health care bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the last three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the numbers of physicians. Not surprisingly, while health care costs are soaring, so are the profits of private health insurance companies. From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation's major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages. It's not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the last five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top seven health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million.

Moving toward a national health insurance program which provides cost-effective universal, comprehensive and quality health care for all will not be easy. The powerful special interests - the insurance companies, drug companies and medical equipment suppliers - will wage an all-out fight to make sure that we maintain the current system which enables them to make billions of dollars. In recent years they have spent hundreds of millions on lobbying, campaign contributions and advertising and, with unlimited resources, they will continue spending as much as they need.

But, at the end of the day, as difficult as it may be, the fight for a national health care program will prevail. Like the civil rights movement, the struggle for women's rights and other grass-roots efforts, justice in this country is often delayed - but it will not be denied. We shall overcome!
To keep up to date on the health care debate in the Senate, sign up for the Bernie Buzz newsletter here.

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Let's be clear. Our health care system is disintegrating. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses because they do not get to the doctor when they should.

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In the United States, healthcare has been one of the biggest political battles of the decade. As a healthcare worker myself, it's an issue that strikes close to home. My years of experience caring for people with dementia, traumatic brain injuries, tetraplegia, cancer, and more has given me a firsthand look into what our healthcare system is like at the ground level, and it's a different world from the vague concepts that politicians volley back and forth at each other.

Healthcare shouldn't be a messy political fight to begin with: it's an issue of basic human rights. And what all too often gets lost in these scuffles are the people most in need.

Our police forces, fire departments, libraries, and even our military are all socialist institutions. Few people would argue for the idea of a private fire department that refuses to rescue people from their home because the fire itself is a "pre-existing condition." So why would we ever frame the issue of healthcare differently, when it's exactly the same thing?

I've watched patients die from preventable conditions because they couldn't afford treatment. In nursing homes, sick people are warehoused into less-than-adequate conditions, with families forced to pay yearly costs of $90,000 a year to put their loved one in a shared room where they and the 30+ other patients on their unit will be taken care of by only two aides. Because of money issues, people lose limbs that they shouldn't need to lose. Patients decline when they shouldn't have to. An increasing number of people don't go to the doctor, even when they develop terrifying symptoms such as mysterious lumps in their throat, because they just can't afford it.

Something has to change. Looking at other countries, the practical solution is universal healthcare  --  preferably a single-payer system.

Though some politicians might argue differently, universal healthcare isn't a radical idea. The majority of Americans actually support the concept. In the rest of the developed world it isn't even an argument, it's a given. Of the 25 wealthiest nations in the world, the United States is the only one that doesn't have it. The majority of these countries use single-payer. Even countries like the Netherlands  --  with its "managed chaos" form of healthcare  --  are still universal.

The United States has the highest health expenditure per capita of any country. With all that money being spent, you'd figure that we're all super-healthy  --  but not really.

In the latest survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which assessed 13 developed nations including Norway, Australia, and the U.K., the USA had the lowest life expectancy, the highest rate of infant mortality, and scarily high rates of heart disease and amputation as a result of diabetes. Of all the developed countries in the world, the United States possesses the dubious distinction of having both the most expensive healthcare system in the world  --  and the least effective.

In the past year, taxpayers in the United States picked up 65% of this country's total healthcare coverage, about $2.1 trillion in taxes. Keep in mind, this is what we're already paying in taxes. On top of that, let's take into account how much money each of us also spends on our private healthcare plans every month, combined with how much we have to pay on personal procedures that aren't totally covered by that plan.

But then Canada, which has a single-payer system, pays almost the same amount in tax funded dollars: 70.7%. In other words, the United States already pays the same amount of money that could fund universal healthcare  --  we just aren't getting any the benefits. Although Canada's system certainly has flaws, Canadians still overwhelmingly approve of universal healthcare as a whole, with 94% calling it a source of collective pride.

That's not all: if we want to get serious about cutting the deficit and don't want to rip Medicare to shreds, many studies by economists such as Dean Baker have shown how a single-payer healthcare plan would actually be a great solution.

Some point to the idea of "free market healthcare" as an alternative option, but in practice this would price out the poor. This is a very real issue, because if a working class person with a relatively low income  --  say, a mechanic  --  comes down with brain cancer, the cost of treatment would greatly exceed their income level, leaving that person the option of either begging their friends for tens of thousands of dollars, or accepting that they have to die without receiving treatment.

In a free market healthcare system, unregulated health insurance companies would be financially rewarded for not accepting sick customers, and punished if they did accept them. Healthcare companies reap profits every month when their customers are healthy, and lose money when their customers are sick. This means that a healthcare company that's looking to profit will refuse applications from customers who are already sick  --  in other words, patients with "pre-existing conditions"  --  exactly the people who need healthcare the most.

Let's not forget the pharmaceutical industry, which is a whole other can of worms. The United States is the only developed country in the world that allows drug companies to set their own prices, which is why last year Turing Pharmaceuticals was able to jack up the price of Daraprim from $13.50 a tablet to $750. Unlike other countries, where prices are set as part of a bureaucratic process, the US system opens the door for these companies to step in and maximize profits, as if a lifesaving drug was comparable to a pair of jeans.

But healthcare shouldn't be about profit. It deserves the same priority in our society that we give to the police, the military, and the fire department, because healthcare isn't like buying a flat screen TV: people don't want healthcare services for their enjoyment, they need them, and a person should not be thrown into bankruptcy because on one unlucky day an icicle dropped onto them from a rooftop.

Ideally, the entire purpose of government in the type of democratic society that we have today is to serve the needs of the people. As a healthcare worker, I can't possibly see how this principle doesn't apply to health. I've been there when people died, seen people suffer when they shouldn't have had to, all while corporations mark down record profits from the suffering of human beings. So yes, I do believe that "healthcare is a right, not a privilege," and I'm not alone. The evidence shows that the various universal healthcare systems that exist in every other developed country are both less expensive and more effective than what we have in the United States.

Again, this shouldn't be a political battle. It's an issue of basic human rights. So when will we get with the program? Hopefully soon.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

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Why the US Should Have Universal Health Care

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In the United States, healthcare has been one of the biggest political battles of the decade. As a healthcare worker myself, it's an issue that strikes close to home.

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Video: The Government can't fix healthcare. 

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Video: The Government can't fix healthcare. 

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Why is the government so bad at healthcare? Why did Obamacare make it more expensive than it already was? Is there a solution? Former Member of Congress Bob McEwen explains. Donate today to PragerU! http://l.prageru.com/2ylo1Yt Have you taken the pledge for school choice? Click here! https://www.schoolchoicenow.com Joining PragerU is free!