Universal Healthcare: Obama's Plan

The idea of universal healthcare is very appealing to many Americans. Most Americans today had had to at one point or another pitch a good chuck of change to pay for healthcare. Of course, Medicare recipients have paid their dues in life; once a person turns 65 years of age in the USA, he/she'll get Medicare for the rest of their natural lives. Even so, there are restrictions ( even if you have Medicare, you'll still need a secondary insurance payer to cover the balance after Medicare pays) to every health insurance plans. You have people who have never worked a day in their lives due to health problems or mental illness, for these people Medi-cal and Medicare are readily available. But for those of us who have had to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps all of our lives; we must wait until we're 65 years of age to get Medicare-unless, we become disabled....

If you've read the first part of my paragraph you'll see why Americans are "gun-ho" about universal heath care. The idea of not having to pay for health insurance, is for the people who have only worked in order to pay for healthcare insurance for their families; the equivalent of having won the state lottery. However, things aren't quite that simple.

PROS:

Ensuring the health of all citizens will benefit everyone in the long run. Single payer system would save close to $300 billion a year. People prefer universal health care to having to pay out of their own pockets. Unemployed people would be entitled to healthcare without having to pay money which being unemployed they most likely don't have. Businesses would save money. Tax payers would benefit as a whole. People will be able to go where they choose to without having too many restrictions.

CONS:

Healthcare is not a given right, nor should it be the responsibility of the government. Free market restrictions. Sources say: the USA has ranked below other countries not because of inferior health care, but rather due to obesity. Obesity has been the cause of growing deaths in the USA for years. Many advocates against universal health care feel this is because of people not being sufficiently informed about food and health, and not because the USA doesn't have a universal health care system. Many powerful health insurance conglomerates would break; Aetna, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and many others tight up to the stocks/futures' markets would crash bringing egregious results to the already failed USA economy.

Who knows what Obama will bring. He ran his presidential race mainly on the universal healthcare issue. He knew/knows this has been a thorn on the American people for a long time. But if this is passed; only the future will say how beneficial this new concept will be to the American economy.