How is healthcare a privilege

Earning money, saving for health, and choosing employment with health coverage is what hardworking, self-reliant individuals should do in their productive working years to ensure access to the privilege of healthcare for themselves and for their children. As these individuals work, they pay into Medicare, and this is the system that ensures that hardworking, self-reliant individuals will retain access to health care when they are no longer capable of work.

For those who are working hard and earning wages that do not cover the cost of healthcare, access to government assistance or charity is an earned privilege. However, from this point of view, those who are not productive members of society do not deserve access to care—nor to collective pools of money paid into by those who are productive. Supporting those who cannot contribute is seen as detrimental to the system, opening the door for abuse of the system.

Parties that believe healthcare is a right tend to use rhetorical frameworks that demonstrate all lives have equal value and that access to healthcare for all is necessary for a prosperous society.

There are many people who—through no fault of their own—are born with physical or mental disorders that bar them from work and many who, despite having some productive years, develop chronic conditions that prohibit them from working. There are also those who do work—like the estimated 35 percent of the adult workforce in the United States who are in the gig economy—who do not have access to healthcare because of lack of access to employer coverage.

Those who believe healthcare is a right state that investing in the health of all these people is essential because, with healthcare, these humans have the capacity to live up to their greatest potentials and may contribute to our communities in a way that cannot always be measured within a framework of contribution to a GDP.

Overall, supporting those who cannot work can lead to abuses in the system, but this is a small price to pay for opening the door to all citizens to live up to their greatest human potential.

Ultimately, all the questions that come before connect to one penultimate question around whether our fates are connected or if they are separate.

Those who believe healthcare is a right utilize the rhetoric of the connected. What impacts one of us impacts all of us —both in the realm of the negative and the in the realm of the positive. Healthcare, therefore, needs to be a right because if the most vulnerable member of our society is not cared for, it means that we—as a collective—are not cared for. The real-world implications of this are seen in a healthcare system that is the most expensive, least effective, and least accessible in the western world.

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Modification Date: -. Creator: -. PDF Producer: -. PDF Version: -. Page Count: -. Page Size: -. Various factors are responsible for this unrealistic, unreasonable and almost criminally raised cost of healthcare by hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. Politicians will probably never pass a universal healthcare plan for reasons many of us know.

When there are too many disagreements between the two political parties and high-dollar lobbying, it is hard to make decisions against the well-being of insurance and drug companies. In order to control expenses we need to make more strict regulations for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, as well as hospitals and physicians. As ex-Senator Tom Daschle wrote in his book, if we are to succeed, it is critical to understand what went wrong in the past, and to figure out how we can avoid those pitfalls in future.

Most of us are believing more and more everyday that our nation needs universal healthcare, as in other developed countries, and that it is way overdue. The scare tactic of using the word "socialism" whenever someone talks about universal healthcare has to stop.

Reining in insurance and pharmaceutical companies is crucial before it is too late. The propaganda by opponents of universal healthcare, that it would create rationing of healthcare, is an exaggeration; we already are being rationed. Total healthcare expenses in United States were nearly 3.

National Healthcare expenditures are projected to rise sharply in coming years reaching 6 trillion dollars by or 21 percent of projected GDP. This is a very complex domestic problem and is linked to many variables including our economy. The perception of complexity is also created because the key beneficiaries of this system — that is, the insurance and drug companies — know they will not be able to milk the system and exploit the patients anymore if we adopt universal healthcare.