Universal health care is the only system that can manage the masses
The United States trains many of the world’s best doctors, surgeons and nurses, offers some of the highest paid locum doctors jobs, and sustains a quality of healthcare very few countries can match. Why is it then that the life expectancy of this country ranks so much lower than other western nations?
The answer most likely stems from America’s health care system. Even after Obama’s sweeping health care reforms there are still tens of millions of Americans without medical insurance. Those who can benefit from Obamacare will only do so from 2014 onwards, assuming that the Republican Party is unable to repeal the healthcare bill in the next few years. Meanwhile, in America there are countless numbers of cancer and leukaemia suffers who have been denied treatment by insurance companies because of a number of technicalities.
Medical insurance companies sometimes ’opt out'of paying for a person’s treatment because the patient did not state their history of pre-existing conditions. For example, a cancer sufferer who has suffered the disease in the past is considered by the insurance companies as ’high-risk’, meaning that their chances of survival are regarded as being lower. Ultimately, this process involves making a choice between lives that are deemed ’worthy ’of insurance and those that are deemed ’unworthy’.
Here in Britain, any doctor of a private medical facility (outside of the NHS) who worked by this same principle would be tried in court and possibly sentenced to imprisonment. Meanwhile, in the US this sort of regime is occurring day after day, often unbeknownst to most Americans. Unlike in Britain, where health care is a universal human right, in America the fate of one’s life is determined by a ’price’. The price that medical insurance companies are willing to pay to cover the medical fees of a patient, before that patient is considered ’unworthy'of any further treatment.
It is clear that putting the lives of vulnerable Americans in the hands of insurance companies is a failed system. It devalues humanity and distorts the true purpose that a health care system should live up to. As many uninsured Americans continue to look to Canada - or even Cuba, to find medical care, the British NHS continued to adopt the principle of providing health care for all, from the cradle to the grave. It may have its weaknesses and its challenges, but the principle of the NHS is something that every country should aspire to.